Zimbabwe printed a $100 trillion banknote — and it barely bought groceries

At the peak of Zimbabwe's hyperinflation in November 2008, prices were doubling roughly every 24-25 hours — a rate at which money lost real value almost in real time.

The government printed a banknote worth 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (100,000,000,000,000) — and at the height of the crisis, that bill covered only a handful of basic groceries.

People carried cash around in plastic shopping bags not for show, but out of necessity — and many chose to spend their entire paycheck the day they got it, because by evening it would already be worth noticeably less.

The stakes: the country eventually abandoned its own currency altogether in favor of the US dollar and other foreign currencies — one of the few documented cases of a sovereign state completely giving up its national currency because its citizens simply stopped trusting it.