I went to the grocery store and spent $18.32. I wrapped some accumulated change today (in transparent coin wrappers with labels featuring my name and phone number affixed) and tried to pay with a wrapped roll of quarters and two wrapped rolls of dimes ($20). However, the clerk (a pimpled teenager) told me that he couldn’t accept wrapped change as payment and directed me to the Coinstar machine at the entrance. (Not an option as these machines charge an 8% surcharge, and while $1.60 isn’t a lot of money I’ve damned sure never seen the day I’d toss it into the sewer.)
Since I was in a hurry (dinner items) I didn’t follow my instinct to just leave and get the groceries elsewhere but just put them on my debit card. I know that Pinky McPimple doesn’t make policy and is just following orders and he doesn’t deserve and won’t respond to a lecture on legal specie, but am I or am I not correct that coinage is legal tender and therefore must be accepted?
*I could have counted it out I suppose, but that would have quite pissed off the line behind me as it would have required counting out 20 quarters and 81 dimes.
I don’t know how the law views this, but if I were a merchant, I would not accept wrapped rolls of coins. There is no way to be certain that all the disks in the roll are actually real coins without counting them out one by one. Someone could package up a bunch of slugs with a real coin on the top and the bottom.
It absolutly need not be accepted for both the reason pinkfreud said and the high pain-in-the-neck factor. Imagine being behind the guy who brings in a coffee can full of pennies to pay for his charcoal and steaks. Especially if they weren’t bank rolls.
The question of whether wrapped coins are legal tender is irrelevant to whether the clerk should choose to accept them. “Legal tender” refers to money which must be accepted in payment of debts; you have incurred no debt to the merchant but rather are making an “offer of payment” which he is free to accept or reject as he (or the store manager) sees fit.
I believe a merchant has the legal right to refuse to sell to you even if what you present in payment is “legal tender.”
"According to the ‘Legal Tender Statute’ (section 5103 of title 31 of the U.S. Code), ‘United States coins and currency (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues.’ This means that all U.S. money, as identified above, when tendered to a creditor legally satisfies a debt to the extent of the amount (face value) tendered.
However, no federal law mandates that a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services not yet provided. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills."
You are not, in this instance. In fact, in the situation you describe, where no debt has been incurred, the clerk or the store may refuse to accept any currency, coins checks or credit cards and may opt to accept clamshells or acorns instead. A merchant is only unable to refuse legal tender in the case where a debt is owed, such as at a restaurant after the meal has been consumed. Even in this case, I don’t believe rolled coinage is legal tender, but I’ll defer to someone more knowledgable.
I used to work for a small bookstore. We didn’t keep much cash in the register, and the owner directed us not to accept any bills over $20 unless the purchase was large enough that less than $20 would be given back in change. Occasionally a customer would get argumentative about this, but the store’s owner checked with an attorney and was told that no law compels merchants to accept money in any particular form (or even to accept US currency at all). If we had wanted to say that we’d only accept payment in 1940 Deutschmarks, that would have been okay. We wouldn’t have made any sales, of course, but we would have been within the law, as long as we were not refusing to sell to people for discriminatory reasons related to sex, race, religion, and such.
8.9% at the local grocery store here. Total ripoff. You’d think they’d be free as an inducement for you to spend your coins at that particular store. Greedy bastards.
Those who have pointed out that Sampiro did not owe a deby to the store are correct. At the point when the clerk refused to accept rolled change, Sampiro had the option of say, “Well, if you don’t want my perfectly good money, then I don’t want to buy these goods.” The store would then have lost a sale, and have had to use paid taff time to restock the shelves with the goods. It doesn’t seem like a good option to the store. Why couldn’t the clerk just have unwrapped the coins and counted them to make sure then were good money?
Yeah! Too bad there isn’t some sort of way to, I dunno, spend your change as you get it, so you never have more than a dollar two in coin at a time. That would be great, wouldn’t it?
I dont think those machines are owned by the store. I think they are owned by an independent person who probably has to pay the store to let them have their machines there.
Speaking as a register jockey–though never a supermarket register jockey–I could do so fairly quickly if I had one of those coin tubes so that I could dump the roll into the tube, verify that it is all there, and dump the coins back into the roll. If I had to count all of them by hand, it would take longer. While it’s fairly easy to do so if there is no one else in line, get two or three more people behind the guy giving you coins and it’s gonna start getting ugly.
Also, one of the more common scams is to take a dime tube, stuff it with 48 pennies, then put a dime on each end. It’s pretty obvious if you actually get the coins out, because the pennies will stick in the tube and then, obviously, if you get them all out you actually see pennies. I’ve seen at least two people try it, plus at least one more person who had no imagination at all and just tried to pass a rolled slug. I look on rolled change with the same suspicion I give large bills.
No one is being “ripped off” here. Coinstar is providing a service by converting your bulk coins into more flexible paper currency. If you believe the service to be overpriced, you simply choose not to use it. There also exist magical places called banks where they will provide these services for free.
Do banks still do this free of charge? I haven’t taken a big pile of change to a bank for changing for years, but i was under the impression that taking a bag full of coins to a bank now also incurs a fee or charge of some sort.
Would it not get even uglier if the customer took Giles’s advice and just walked out of the store, leaving you with a whole bunch of groceries at your register?
Less flexible, actually. The Coinstars I’m familiar with (In Albertson’s) don’t actually pay off in money - they pay off in vouchers for the store. Coinstar reimburses the merchant for the vouchers, and they are fairly restrictive. From Coinstar’s own FAQ:
I’m not sure what kind of money is payed to allow the machine in the door, if any, or in which direction it flows. But Coinstar has a “partner” relationship with the store - this isn’t really an independent franchisee setting up a stand-alone vending machine in rented store space.
Yes, IMO, it’s an excessive charge for the service, so I don’t use it. I spend my change rather than letting it accumulate.