I Invested in Bitcoin at Winn-Dixie (And Other Signs of Impending Doom) - Humor Column

Grocery stores used to be simple. You walked in, you bought your discount meat, and you left. Now they want you to invest in the future of global finance while you're standing next to the claw machine.

At 40.9 years old, my personal financial strategy consists of hoping the check engine light on my 2013 Dodge Dart is just a suggestion, keeping my fingers crossed that Caleb doesn't outgrow his shoes this week, and occasionally finding a crumpled five-dollar bill in my laundry. I am not what you would call a HIGH FINANCE EXPERT.

But the other day, Caleb and I are at Winn-Dixie. I am there to buy heavy cream and an offensive amount of bacon because I am still punishing myself with the keto diet. MEDICAL FACT: If you eat enough bacon, your body eventually stops realizing it's starving for carbohydrates and just accepts its greasy, miserable fate.

While I am comparing the prices of pork products, Caleb has wandered over to the front of the store. He is currently vibrating at a frequency that shatters glass, begging to use the Coinstar machine.

Remember Coinstar? You used to dump a jar of sticky pennies into a slot, the machine would make a noise like a woodchipper destroying a silverware drawer, and then it would spit out a receipt for eight dollars that you could spend on more groceries. It was a simple, honest transaction.

Not anymore. Now, the Coinstar machine at Winn-Dixie asks if you want to buy Bitcoin.

Let me pause here. Bitcoin is an invisible currency created by internet ghosts that is somehow worth thousands of dollars, despite the fact that you can't actually hold it, fold it, or use it to buy a sandwich.

And now, they are selling it between the scratch-off lottery ticket dispenser and a claw machine that contains exactly one tragically faded stuffed Minion.

I stood there, staring at the screen. The machine is telling me I can insert cold, hard, American cash, and it will give me a piece of paper with a "Bitcoin redemption code" on it.

This is where the DREAD sets in. The world has officially passed me by. There was a time when I understood how money worked. You earned it, you bought a Snickers bar with it, and you lost the remaining change in your couch cushions. Now, people are buying invisible space-money at the exact same place I buy reduced-price ground beef.

I tried to imagine explaining this to a pioneer. "Yes, I took my actual paper money, put it into a machine that smells faintly of spilled Mountain Dew, and in return, I received a mathematical equation that I hope to one day trade for a lawnmower." They would have burned me at the stake.

Caleb, meanwhile, is tugging on my pant leg. "Dad. Dad. Dad. Put the money in. I want the Bitcoin." He thinks Bitcoin is a type of candy. Or possibly a small, plastic ninja that comes in a plastic bubble.

I had to physically negotiate with my own kneecaps just to crouch down to his eye level and explain that we cannot eat Bitcoin. We cannot play with Bitcoin. We can only feed our dollars into the loud machine, receive a grocery store receipt, and then go sit in our aging Dodge Dart and pretend we are participating in the modern economy.

I ended up feeding a five-dollar bill into the machine just to make him stop vibrating. The machine whirred. It processed my transaction. It printed a receipt.

I am now the proud owner of what I assume is zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero-something of a Bitcoin. I put the receipt in my wallet. Right next to my expired coupon for fifty cents off a block of cream cheese.