I check the reject slot of a Coinstar machine when I walk past one. Over the years I have found a number of neat coins and things. Old, 90% silver coins often get rejected. Dirty coins also Various tokens and foreign coins So far this year I have found Canadian, British, Irish and some South American coins. My best find might be a sterling silver ring. If there are only a few I usually check them on the spot and put them back if they are ordinary.
Lately I had the idea to “salt” the reject slot with semi-valuable coins that I just don’t need. My grandson was collecting wheat pennies (1958 and earlier) and I have lots of duplicates from rolls I bought. They go back to the early 1900s. So a take a few and toss them in the slot. I am sure the finder will be quite excited! I have also placed casino tokens that are not silver content.
Earlier this year I got 2 silver dimes in change at the Dairy Queen. I went back through the line and asked for dimes in my change. They only had one more silver dime but after a bit of questioning the kid remembered they did get a customer wrapped roll of dimes from the bank. Arghhh, I missed a bunch of them!
I never thought to do this, neat idea. I used to check the coin return of every pay phone I passed, I was surprised by how often I’d get a free quarter.
I don’t use these anymore after one ripped me off during a move when trying to dispose of some spare change. I used my usual Amazon option to keep all of the funds, but the code failed to work, and when I went back to complain, the manager gaslighted me about the store code not being from his store and refused to reimburse me. Most banks now have their own machines (100% reimbursement without needing any merchant codes).
My credit union used to have their own machine in the lobby. It worked much better then a Coinstar. It was like a top loading washing machine and you could dump many pounds of coins in it. They eliminated it but now the Coinstar deposits directly into my account using my debit card. It does charge a fee but it is about half of the normal Coinstar rate.
I stopped using Coinstar when they stopped offering Amazon gift cards (I never had a problem redeeming them). I could never find any information on why Coinstar and Amazon parted ways, I assume one of them was losing money in the deal.
I haven’t used a Coinstar machine in years but when I did, I took the deposit in the form of an Amazon e-gift card, because there was no service fee involved. As I remember, cashing out the deposit at the supermarket meant losing roughly ten percent in the service fee. And looking at the Coinstar website, they still offer e-gift cards for other companies, like Apple, Lowes, Home Depot and so forth.
I stopped using Coinstar machines when the self serve cashes (which I usually prefer not to use) at the dollar store, and Food Basics started taking coins. No percentage loss, and I get about 30 bucks a month of grocery product or junk food based on spare change collected going about my day.
Coinstar is good when you have many dollars worth of coins. The self checkout is good for just a few coins, but would be a hassle with a coffee can filled with coins. With coinstar, just dump them all in and be done with it.
They’re two different types of machine. Coinstar (in Canada) takes 12%. If you have a zip loc baggie of coins, you just feed them into the hopper on the self serve cash, and no % is deducted for their counting services.