Sometimes an iPhone is worth every penny.
A group of Muscovites reportedly hauled an entire bathtub full of coins Tuesday to one of Moscow’s 38 official retailers to purchase the desired gadget.
A Facebook user posted a photograph of the cast iron bath filled to the brim with coins and surrounded by onlookers armed with smartphones filming the clerk count the change.
Early on Wednesday, an Instagram video appeared showing a group of friends filling the bath with coins, loading it into a car and bringing it to the Evropeisky Mall in central Moscow.
At least two scuffles broke out with security guards before the group managed to carry the 350-kilogram bath into the store, according to the video posted by blogger Svyatoslav Kovalenko.
“This is the legendary bath of change,” Kovalenko boasted in the video that has been viewed over 16,000 times.
A spokeswoman for the store wrote that the 100,000 rubles (roughly $1,500) in coins were enough to get the buyer an iPhone XS.
Media outlets dubbed Kovalenko “Scrooge McDuck a la Russe,” after an animated Disney character famous for diving into a vault full of gold coins in the DuckTales cartoon series.
The practice of paying for iPhones with massive bulks of coins in Russia dates back several years.
A YouTube video posted in September that generated nearly 2 million views documented one user purchasing an iPhoneX with coins weighing an estimated 100 kilograms.
A month later, almost 4 million viewers watched another blogger buy an iPhoneXS with a bucket-full of 10-ruble coins. The gag turned out to be a ruse as the blogger had reportedly made a false bottom inside the bucket and only filled the top with coins.
But the title of most-watched coin purchase goes to YouTuber Dmitry Shilov – a favorite among British tabloids – whose purchase of an iPhone with a jar of coins was viewed 5.6 million times since 2015.
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