867-5309 Creates Grocery Store Problems?
867-5309 creates grocery store problems?
What songs have a phone number in it? The only one I can think of is 867-5309 (Jenny Jenny) by Tommy Tutone. But why did 867-5309 create a grocery store problem in North Carolina? Here’s the deal:
A Charlotte, North Carolina man racked up thousands of dollars in Food Lion rewards using his phone number. Chris Och really has the famous phone number 867-5309 made popular by the song “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone in 1981. Och suspects that others without accounts use his number to claim rewards at the checkout. Food Lion deactivated his number due to concerns about potential misuse. Chris says he has saved $92,965. As of 2023, calling 204-867-5309 will actually play the song.
So now I’m wondering if anyone reading this has randomly used the 867-5309 number for rewards here in #Detroit ? I found this reference to the song on reddit:
In Detroit, back in the early 1980s, calling 867-5309 reached a recording saying the number had been changed — “to a non-published (unlisted) number.”
Justice Elena Kagan slipped 867-5309 into a US Supreme Court ruling, using it as an example of trucking company stickers that say: “Don’t like my driving? Call 1-800…”
If I ever get to meet Justice Kagan, I’m going to ask if her colleagues noticed it.
The hacker magazine, 2600, once published a compilation of what calling 867-5309 would reach, in every US/Canadian area code. A lot of them were answering machine messages referencing “Jenny” or even playing the song.
Back in 2008 someone wrote about what a pain in the butt it was having the number:
So was there a Jenny? Tommy Tutone did an interview back in 2021 about it with Forbes and answered it…kinda:
Forbes: Was there really a Jenny, or was it somebody in the song-writers’ heads – Alex Call and Jim Keller? There seems to be debate here.
Tutone: They tell me I have a tenuous hold on reality. But Jenny and I think she’s real, and Jim and Alex say she’s not. That’s all I can say. She did give me that number, and I did write it on the bathroom wall instead of giving it to Jim. But they claim that never happened.
Tommy Tutone a one hit wonder? Our very own Donielle Flynn thinks so:
