Our bank recently stopped taking rolled coin (and they stopped taking loose coin ages ago). Which left me in a quandry, for what was I to do with all that pocket change collecting in jars in the kitchen?
There’s a machine called Coinstar, which is an electronic coin-counter redemption device at our local grocery store. I had dismissed it for years due to the outrageous 8.9% coin counting fee, but recently they started waiving the fee if you redeem your change for gift certificates at a number of online retailers.
One of these is amazon.com, so today I carried a plastic jug full of loose coin down to Price Chopper and dumped it into the Coinstar machine, selecting the amazon.com gift certificate option. It was a strangely entertaining process…
For starters, the machine is loud. For seconders, it is slow. So after I had finished dumping the change and the last coin had disappeared into the bowels of the machine, the updating display on the screen read only a measly $24 dollars or so. It took a good few minutes for it to finish counting, updating the display with each coin, until a grand total of $62.92 was displayed. It even has a nifty summary:
1 Half Dollar
122 Quarters
221 Dimes
111 Nickels
377 Pennies
In a slightly sneaky move, just before ‘checkout’, it is easy to unwittingly choose the ‘cash-out’ option and pay the 8.9% fee (even though when you start you choose gift certificate). But they didn’t fool me, and my receipt contained a code that I just used at amazon for $62.92 in credit.
Of course I immediately spent that credit. And what did I buy, you ask? The book Electronic Plastic and the DVD Yo-Yo Girl Cop (aka Sukeban Deka).
Summary: Coinstar is fun, and it works well. Never again will I roll my loose change 🙂
Before I rolled my coins I used to pay the Coinstar processing fee, although it was only 6% back then. When my coin bag started getting in the $200 range I decided I’ll start rolling them and take them to the bank instead. I’ve rolled a considerable sum, but not checked with the bank to see if they even accept them yet.
I tried to fool the Coinstar machine with Aussie coins and Santa Cruz arcade tokens, but it knew better.
The probably reason the bank no longer accepts rolled coin is that they have to break up the rolls and recount them all anyway, which is time consuming and expensive, since people make mistakes or are deliberately deceptive. I know back in the day we used to get the odd rolled coin at Shop’n’Save with blanks or foreign currency in it…
I would think it would be easier for the bank to just machine count unrolled coins.
I find it very annoying that a bank would refuse to accept coin because it’s too expensive to process! Also it’s ridiculous that I need to pay a 3rd party company to count my coins and convert them to paper money. Coinstar is a business that really shouldn’t exist. Perhaps I should just spend my coins instead of hording them. 🙂
Slightly unrelated but I got a Canadian quarter as change the other day and I felt a little ripped off.