Category: Family

We occasionally get deer in our backyard, but usually they seem to be simply ‘passing through’. So we were quite surprised the other day when we found they are apparently comfortable enough in the yard to use it as their living room…

  < Deer me

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 🙂