Since CoinStar machines came along and banks stopped giving individuals free wrappers, I use the CoinStar.
And I never walk by one without checking the reject chute. Two reasons; sometimes it rejects good coins that people just abandon and sometimes it rejects even better coins people abandoned. By that I mean silver dimes, quarters and half dollars. This week alone I got $2.75 face in silver from my two trips to the supermarket.
I worked for a company and we got paid by an advertiser who owned a coin-op car wash. He gave us a giant bag of $500 in quarters. There was no way in hell I was going to roll that much change, so I weighed it. It was the correct weight and the bank accepted the deposit, but double checked with a coin counter. I feel sorry for that guy.
If you have accumulated half a gallon of coins, I think you probably value convenience more than money. So go with CoinStar.
I voted for the option of seeing the poll results. 
I use credit/debit card for virtually everything. I can’t remember the last time I had any change other than one and two dollar coins (yes, I’m in Canada).
That’s what it came down to.
Really? Are you sure of this amount? Because when the kids did this
for school, a full overflowing, squeeze no more in, one gallon plastic ice cream pail totaled just under $40 with nothing but pennies in it.
When I was single, I tried to use a gallon syrup jug for change. The glass jug cracked off in a straight line about 1" up from the bottom after it was about 25% full. I’ve gone metal or plastic since then.
My bank doesn’t check, either - at the time of deposit. I like throwing change into my bedside drawer as a sort of savings method, qand every six months I’ve got a couple hundredf bucks (this is Canada, we have $1 and $2 coins) and I roll them and bring them in. The bank always has faith in me.
Of course, there may be some way after the fact they check, and then they’d come after me if I cheated them.
As a former bank teller, I’m super surprised that they accept hand-rolled coin at face value. I, personally, had someone who used dime wrappers, put dimes at each end, then filled the rolls with pennies. When she saw me crack them open into the coin counter, I swear the air just left her. I didn’t say anything to her, but she started giving me excuses about how her boyfriend rolled the coins, etc. Whatever, lady, you didn’t get one past me.
And even if you’re not trying to defraud the bank, it’s so easy to miss a coin or two in a roll.
As far as using the Coinstar, if you don’t want $300 worth of Amazon, you can always break it up into the other gift cards they offer. Put about $100 in. Complete the transaction for that store. Start over and complete it for another store. Rise and repeat.
How could you fill a dime wrapper with pennies? They are larger in diameter than dimes, so the wrapper isn’t likely to fit around the pennies. And even if it does, it should be really obvious that the roll is too fat.
Nope, they weigh them. When my daughter worked at a bank that was part of settling her cash drawer at the end of each shift.
When my coin bucket is full, I head to Giant Eagle and use the CoinStar machine there. I select an Amazon gift-card so my transaction is free.
Where is the option for “Use a credit/debit card for nearly everything. Accumulate approximately $2.00 in change a year, usually lose it.”?
There isn’t one.
Hand-rolled coins are notoriously loosely rolled. You don’t usually get the super-tight rolling that comes from coins that are machine-rolled and wrapped. And yes, it was obvious that the roll wasn’t right.
This actually happens so often, it has it’s own slang term: “penny rolling.” There’s a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to coin rolling scams.
But some people will try just about anything to make a few extra bucks. I mean, she had probably about 10 rolls (this was a few years ago, so I could be off on the number). So if there’s 2 dimes and 48 pennies in each roll, that’s $.68 instead of $5 per roll. She was trying to get $50 for $6.80. In other words, she was trying to make $43.20 off of me. Not happening, girl.
And today in Walmart, what did I see? A CoinStar machine! never paid attention to it before.
Besides sight and feel, which are very good indicators for an experienced teller, there are other tricks as well. Running a thumbnail along the paper roll will usually show whether the coins inside have ridges (reeds), useful in telling pennies from dimes and quarters from slugs. Back in the day, when in doubt, we would also take a sheet of carbon paper, place it upside down on a piece of white paper, hold the roll with one finger on each end and whack it on the carbon paper. The resulting “image” on the white paper would show at a glance if the coins were the same size and thickness, whether they were reeded, if the spacing was off (stuffed with paper in the middle, for instance) and how many were in the roll.
Oh, yeah, tellerz got trix.
nm
Many years ago when I was tending bar one or two days a week, I had a one gallon glass apple juice jar. A quarter would just fit inside the neck and it was very hard to remove the change from the jar. So I saved my nickels, dimes, and quarters for a year from my bar tips. When it was time to cash in, I discovered that the jar was way to heavy to carry in. I dumped all the change into a very heavy duty duffle bag and took it into my bank for counting. It took them a half hour on the sorter, but I ended up with $680 for my trip.
My CU has a counter so neither option applied to me. If you have a ton of coins, you will be bored to tears if you take the time to roll them. In the old days we had to put our account number on each roll in case they come up short. So simple to use the machine, though the Canadian coins will be rejected and sometimes even US coins require a second pass to be accepted. Our major supermarket has a coinstar machine and they’ll let you spend the entire amount, no fees, in their store.
Add me to the list of people who use CoinStar and get 100% of the money as an Amazon gift card. Especially useful now that the cost of Amazon Prime has gone up 20%.
Before CoinStar had this “feature,” I had another option - take all my coins to Las Vegas, and have a casino cashier convert them to chips; they don’t charge any sort of fee either - not even in a casino where there was a CoinStar machine right next to the cashier’s cage!