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 🙂