Man Buys Brand New Smartphone With Avocados

The health and fitness industry is full of trends and has many popular foods that are constantly in the public eye due to their nutritional powers with none getting more press that the humble avocado in recent years.

The avocado has experienced a boom in growth in recent years with the popularity of it skyrocketing due to it’s delicious taste, excellent nutritional values and versatility in how it’s used in recipes. With that boom in popularity also always comes a rapid rise in price with the cost of avocados experiencing an all time high. Especially when worldwide avocado farmers are reporting low harvests.

Due to the worldwide shortage, one of Chile’s biggest department stores, Ripley, had decided to use avocados as an unconventional alternative means of currency. Chile is a major production country of avocados and is currently facing a supply shortage of the fruit that is widely consumed domestically. In recent weeks prices have been sent sky-high, reaching more than 5,000 pesos (£6.27) per kilo in street markets.

With the situation receiving a lot of national media coverage, the department store Ripley have been even displaying the “equivalent price in avocados” alongside monetary prices for certain items as part of its recent CyberDay promotions. On their website one of those promotional offers for a Motorola smartphone listed was listed as either 189,990 pesos (£222) or 58 kilograms of avocados.

One savvy guy, Camilo Briceño, now known on social media worldwide as “El Weon de las Paltas” (The Avocado Guy), took full advantage of the offer responding to Ripley on social media with the comment “I accept the challenge. Where can I leave them?” (the avocados). To Camilo’s surprise, Ripley’s official account left a comment that read, “Good. We meet tomorrow at 12pm at Ripley Parque Arauco store. You bring the avocados and we’ll have the cell phone.”

Camilo turned up at the Ripley store the next day at the scheduled time with several sacks of avocados and successfully used them to purchase a Motorola Moto X4 smartphone. No-one can verify if the avocado offer was just a stunt by Ripley or a genuine method of payment but nevertheless the offer was honoured and Camilo bagged himself a brand new smartphone.

While Camilo was successful in his endeavour, Ripley have since removed the price of 58 avocados from its website incase others with a similar idea try to follow suit!