Pesos for Pizza

So Pizza Patron is accepting Mexican currency as legal tender for its products. What’s the big deal? It seems like good business sense to me: sell the pizza for money. You can take pesos to the bank just like pennies. Depending on the exchange rate, it might even be more profitable to be paid in pesos. What’s with the uproar anyway? The Texas-based pizza chain saw an opportunity and took advantage of it. Apparently, someone realized that there were a lot of folks running around with foreign currency that they weren’t exchanging, so they offered to relieve those folks of their unwanted change. The theory was that people would buy more pizza than normal just to get rid of the money. Time will tell if they were correct.

Pizza Patron has been getting tons of complaints and even death threats ever since the promotion began and their promotion and its associated problems have been broadcast on all the major news networks. People seem to think that Pizza Patron is somehow supporting illegal immigration by accepting pesos. People have also been quoted as saying this is not Mexico, so they shouldn’t accept pesos. These statements and opinions are just ridiculous! Taking pesos is just good business sense and it doesn’t support illegal immigration in any way.

First of all, do you really think illegal immigrants sneak across the border to buy pizza? Come on, somebody who just snuck across the border to find a menial labor job with no benefits has got more on their mind than spending $20 on pizza. If they’re crossing the border for work, they probably don’t even have any pesos and after they work here, they’ll have dollars. I doubt that there’re very many illegal aliens spending their few remaining pesos at Pizza Patron, but even if they are, why is that a problem?

We should encourage everyone to spend his or her pesos! It’s good for the economy. If they don’t use them to buy pizza and don’t exchange them, then people will just end up taking them back to Mexico and spending them there. That would help the Mexican economy. If they are spent here, it helps our economy. It really is that simple, spend pesos, and improve the economy. People have pesos in the U.S. because they haven’t bothered to exchange them for some reason or another. Note: exchange services and banks don’t ask for proof of citizenship before exchanging currency so illegal immigrants aren’t hoarding pesos out of fear. If people don’t have somewhere to spend pesos, then that money can’t help the economy grow.

Finally, this isn’t anything new. Pizza Patron is hardly the first company to accept foreign currency. Growing up in a northern state, I worked in a gas station that accepted Canadian currency. We offered an exchange rate that was in our favor and happily accepted anyone’s money. Pizza Patron is not even the first company to accept pesos. Most companies in Border States accept foreign currency, Pizza Patron just happened to start their promotion at an inopportune time. Of course, given all the free publicity they’ve received, maybe this was the perfect time.