That is just bizarre. Did you ask to talk to the manager in your bank? Threaten to close your account? For once in our pitiful lives we have the power!
SEND THEM TO ME!:D:cool:
I will take care of them!
For you.
I mean.
BTW–I used to have that kind of problem, until I switched to a credit union.
Sometimes, in these situations, it helps to wonder out loud.
You tilt your head to the side and look off into the middle distance and say “I wonder if [insert name of major competitor] has a policy like that”.
Worked for me at PC world - I was buying, I dunno - a printer or something.
They asked for my postal address at the checkout.
I refused
The guy said it was absolutely necessary, for the warranty.
I told them that if it went wrong, I’d know where to find them.
He insisted harder.
I wondered out loud whether Comet (which was just over the road) would need my home address just to sell me a printer.
It suddenly became unnecessary to know my address.
For a while I used a bank that would only take my coins after I wrote my account number on each roll. I never really understood why, unless it was to make it easier to find me if I was dumb enough to pass them a roll of slugs. But refusing to take coins? Never happened. Accept with obvious lack of enthusiasm, yes, sometimes; but refuse, never. That’s weird.
£420 in coin bags would be 21 bags of coin. If they’re bagged properly, then all the cashier has to do is weigh them and pop them in a drawer. I’ve landed in a bank with that many bags of bronze with no problems.
At my bank, only some of the branches have coin counters, so bags of loose coins have to be deposited only at those. They will credit the deposit within 48 hours.
Wow, my credit union has coin machines at every branch. It’s free for members as long as it’s under some fairly large amount, IIRC. I know I’ve done a couple hundred dollars at a time before. AFAIC, they still take them rolled, too, I just don’t do that anymore.
You dump in your coins and take the ticket to the teller, who deposits the cash into your account (or hands bills over). Easy-peasy.
Banks in the UK nearly all have a little weighing machine at each position - coin is nearly always bagged in transparent plastic bags (I don’t think paper rolls are common at all), designed to contain specific amounts of coin of particular types (there’s usually a little table of filling instructions printed on the bag).
10p pieces weigh twice as much as 5p pieces, so they can be mixed in the bag - the specified monetary total will weigh the same however composed.
Same with 2p and 1p pieces
There is a big problem with counterfeit £1 coins at the moment - and the counterfeits are not easily distinguishable from the real ones - I wonder if the bank suspected chowder of trying to launder forged currency…
I suppose we need to try somebody else doing the same thing, but without chowder’s dodgy appearance and demeanour? 
For some reason, the coin counter is located behind the tellers, so no easy access for me. There is only one location for my credit union, but if there were more than one, I wouldn’t expect them to deliver a service that wasn’t available. (and who leaves coins with tellers? Unless you’ve already counted it, you would have no idea if someone helped themselves to part of your money).
It’s usually not an issue, but today I wanted to do some banking. It will have to wait until Saturday (the next day I’m off).
Your bank charges fees on its own ATMs? 
Lemme tell you something about Japan and banking. They don’t have checks (or even cheques). The only time you don’t pay a fee for accessing your money through your own ATM is when you access it during business hours (9-3, or maybe 9-4, M-F). If you go to a different company’s ATM, you can’t access your yen AT ALL (unless you have a credit card and an overseas account). And the real kick in the ass?
THEY CLOSE THE ATMs. Yup, at 9PM the one poor sod “working” (I say “working” because that’s what I’m doing this week-- sitting in the teachers’ room at school even though the students don’t return for another week. This sort of thing is common here.) behind the shuttered doors of the bank comes out and shutters the little alcove that houses the ATM. This occasionally also happens on holidays. Often convenience stores will have ATMs, but you have to know which one has your bank’s.
Y’know, I try to be culturally sensitive, and see things just as being done a different way, in a different light. One way isn’t necessarily better than another way, right? But then another little voice reminds me of how filled with stupid certain practices are, and I feel much better remembering that I can still sort out what’s culture and what’s simply dumb.
Let me just say that again. THEY CLOSE THE ATMs!!! WTF is wrong with them?!
Me! Me! I’ll volunteer. Erm, you know, as a New Year Resolution to be nice and helpful. So, if somebody would kindly just lend me £420 in coins, that would be fine. 
Always glad to help.
I’m a bit intrigued by Chowder’s money tin. I haven’t seen the kind that you need a can opener to open since I was a child saving up for the summer holiday in a money tin designed to look like a miniature pillar box. Ah, glorious day, the Day of the Opening of the Tin! Come to think of it, that is probably exactly the sort of thing I need now.
(Oops, the pocket money went into the tin: I did not spend my summer holiday inside the tin, no.)
Not sure what’s wrong with them but it’s pretty bad. :eek: I hope there’s a cure. But it’s JAPAN. I thought we were supposed to imagine that Japan was the place that sells all sort of mad things in vending machines, which I could largely live without, but I do like knowing that any ATM I happen to see will let me have money, whether it’s my own bank or not.
Where in Japan are you? I remember the banks used to do this 15 years ago, but once Citibank started advertising 24-hour ATMs it wasn’t too long before the rest of the banks around Tokyo started doing so as well. More recently, all the 24-hour convenience stores I’ve seen around the Kanto region have ATMs inside them.
I remember this pissed me off royally way back when I was living in Shizuoka. I’d want to get some cash on Friday night after work, only to find everything locked up. But it’s been at least 10 years since I encountered that. What areas are still operating like this?
The way banks can act like a flock of sheep is very amusing at times. Not so long ago, Brits would typically be charged a ‘disloyalty fee’ for using an ATM other than of their own bank. Eventually, somebody somewhere broke ranks, and announced that they’d stop this nonsense and that you could use any ATM freely. Guess what? Everyone else decided this was a Good Idea, too.
I think it actually worked both ways, GorillaMan. I seem to recall (although this might only have been Scotland) that I could use any old bank (or pretty much any old bank), THEN one bank, which might have been Barclays, hit on the idea of charging, so the others thought they might follow suit, but I don’t recall that system lasting at all long and soon it was nice and simple again. Well, apart from the times of going to bank and only possessing, say £9.20 and the minimum withdrawal had suddenly become £10. Very sad then.
Ah, that rings a bell, that Barclays wanted not only to continue with the disloyalty fee, but to also charge their own customers for using their own machines…and another bank responded vigorously, by dropping disloyalty fees entirely, which set the ball rolling against Barclays, who retreated and went with popular opinion. My feeling it was an ex-building society, perhaps Abbey, who stood up to the big-boy bullies.
Yep, that sounds familiar. Very end of the 1970s or very early 1980s? I think most of us had hardly bothered to work up a “be careful to use the right machine” strategy before the whole silly nonsense was over and back to normal. But I think it would have been more upsetting, say, in a village with only one machine, or a city where were plenty of machines but the “right” one was in an inconvenient place.
(At a different time, I once had fun breaking a couple of bank ATMs in Aberystwyth. I mean, it wasn’t my fault, oh dear me no. Just, um, technology. And enormously tough luck for anyone who arrived after me and had had the reasonable plan to fetch out some Friday evening money for a weekend of booze or grocery buying or both. Oops)
I’m jealous. The vast majority of banks around here don’t have coin-counting machines, so I have to do it by hand (and Girl Scout cookie time is coming up. Yay.).