Supermarket Surprise

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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I had a big bucket of old change and my husband and I thought we'd take it to our local supermarket and empty it into one of those change machines, get a voucher and put the money towards our weekly shop. The bucket of change yielded a voucher for £123.47 (we'd been collecting it for a while) so we were quite happy. We walked round the shop, chatting away, filling our trolley but not paying any attention to how much we were putting into the trolley. When we got to the checkout, the cashier scanned all of our items and we packed them into bags and loaded them back into the trolley. Then she said "That will be £123.47 please". I thought to myself that that figure sounded familiar, then I looked at my voucher from the change machine and realised that bizarrely it was exactly the same amount. We were both very surprised and slightly confused. It seemed a bit unreal. But I guess it was just a coincidence.
Total votes: 326
Date submitted:Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:34:55 +0000Coincidence ID:4409