There is a shop opening in Soho this month that will not take your money.

This is not charity, nor insolvency, nor the early symptom of a revolution; it is a marketing department's idea of whimsy, and it is — we concede, a little against our will — rather a good one.

For two days in September, at an address on Broadwick Street, Jose Cuervo will deal in the single commodity that the modern Briton possesses in inexhaustible supply: grievance.

The mechanism has the pleasing logic of a fever dream. One enters 'The Inconvenience Store' — got up, with some care, as an ordinary corner off-licence — and, in lieu of cash, presents a written account of one's most recent vexation: the cancelled train, the interminable software update, the wi-fi that expired at the decisive moment. The ticket is handed to a functionary billed as the 'Bossman,' a chilled can is drawn from the fridge, and the transaction is complete.

Complaint has become tender. It is, when you consider it, the only currency in Britain that never suffers from inflation.

The premise rests, as these things now must, on a commissioned statistic:

the average Briton, we are told, forfeits six whole days a year to life's small frictions — the queue, the jam, the forecast that lied. Six days!

One is tempted to note that the true eccentric long ago made his peace with inconvenience, indeed cultivated it, on the sound principle that a life without friction is a life without anecdote. But we shall not be pious. If a nation so determined to be aggrieved can be induced, for once, to convert its irritation into something as agreeable as a cold margarita, that is a public service of a sort, and the Exchequer should take notes.

A club such as ours is, of course, professionally obliged to ask whether this is eccentricity at all, or merely its costume, worn for an afternoon to shift cases of canned tequila.

The honest answer is: the latter, obviously. The whole delightful contraption exists to launch a ready-to-drink Sparkling Margarita and will fold on Friday evening, with its commercial work done. True eccentricity, as every member knows, is disinterested — it does a mad thing for the thing's own sake, and would be baffled by the very notion of a return on investment. And yet. The idea is genuinely charming; the execution is committed; nobody is harmed, and several are refreshed. We have admitted stranger things to the fold on thinner credentials.

So, from the Outside World desk, we extend a qualified salute.

The Inconvenience Store is a small, silly, well-made joke about the way we live now — a people so reliably annoyed that a drinks company has built a working economy on it. Go, if you are passing, and cash in a grievance; the rate, for two days only, is excellent. Just do not mistake it for the real thing. The real eccentrics never needed a fridge full of margaritas to make a virtue of a bad day — only, as ever, the good sense to find the whole business funny.