Make gold coins make more sense

One stack of gold coins is collected (I think at about a 50% rate) from literally hacking through massive heaps of gold with a pickaxe. This suggests that one stack of gold coins is in fact hundreds, if not thousands, of coins---which at typical prices for gold in human societies (across history, really) would suggest that a single stack of gold coins could buy you a house, and 100 could buy you a castle.

Now, maybe there was some sort of hyperinflation episode just before the end that makes the Fisher insist on being paid in such exorbitant amounts (not realizing that the economy has collapsed and no one else accepts gold as payment anymore), but that absolutely does not explain why MAKING COFFEE requires hundreds or thousands of gold coins.

The best we can come up with is the following:
* The coffee machine is coin-operated
* No one can figure out how to open the coin tray and recover the coins
* Due to the hyperinflation episode, one coin only allows you to process one single coffee bean.
THEN it makes sense... almost.

Please do something different here. Almost anything, really. Make coffee not require gold coins. Make gold coin harvesting from coin piles produce hundreds of stacks instead of just one. Get rid of the ludicrous piles of gold and make gold coins found some other way, in suitably scarce quantities. But SOMETHING that doesn't imply I'm spending a lifetime income making a few cups of coffee.