I would imagine that a percentage of the gift cards are lost or destroyed and otherwise fail to be redeemed, in which case Coinstar wins a pile of change.
True story. My son had about $30-40 in change he wanted to get rid of. I told he could drive 5 minutes to the supermarket and use Coinstar or drive 10 minutes to the bank and do the same thing with no servie charge.
He took Coinstar. :smack:
I think your assumption that most banks will count your coins for free is wrong. It definitely depends on your bank and your area.
My buddy recently decided to cash in a huge 5 gallon water jug of coins. His bank wouldn’t touch it. They just handed him some complimentary paper coin wrappers. He was told that they only accept change if it’s in the rolls.
He was so pissed he was going to withdraw all his money and go to a bank with better customer service. He checked out a half dozen banks though, and found that they wont do it either. He had a lot of gripes about the banks “down here”, so I think it has bit to do with location. He couldn’t find any bank down here that would roll his coins.
He didn’t take it to CoinStar because of the huge fee. The change was well over 1,000 dollars so he was rolling his ass off for weeks. Personally I would have taken it to a CoinStar. He agreed that it was probably worth the effort but it was personal now.
That’s interesting. I save coins in a large jar and when it’s full, I bring it to a Crestar bank, dump in the coins and get a receipt. I bring the receipt to a teller and I get the cash right away. Now, I do have to do the work of dumping the coins in a hopper, but I’ve never been charged a fee whatsoever, even though I’m not a member of Crestar. I hope this doesn’t change.
That’s one of the funnier stories I’ve read in a while.
I use Coinstar because I buy enough on Amazon to make it worth it. In fact it feels like free gifts to myself when I do it that way. And since I do everything in the grocery store anyway (including check deposits at the ATM), the Coinstar is just incredibly convenient.
I would never do it though if they were going to take the 10% - that’s highway robbery IMHO. (Oh yeah, right, only 8.9 cents for every dollar - so cheap!!! :rolleyes: )
Call me a cheapskate, but I just can’t believe that people are willing to give away 9% to turn cash into…cash.
Whenever the issue of Coinstar comes up, I always mention coin sorting machines like this one. For the price of about three trips to Coinstar, the machine automatically sorts your coins. When a tube fills up, you slip the coins into a paper roll. No sorting or counting by hand. (For about twice the price of the one linked above, you can get one made out of cherry wood from Hammacher Schlemmer.)
I’ve been using a machine like this for years. I empty my pockets straight into the hopper every night, and every few months I take a stack of rolled coins to the bank.
I think you just nailed the problem for me and people like me. It is just change even if there is $120 of it and the process you just described is way more work than I want to go through. I basically consider it found money. I am exceptionally busy these days and I can easily quantify the value of my time. The time I would spend doing all of that simply isn’t worth it to me unless we are talking about $1000 in quarters only. Plus, I am almost always tied up during my bank’s hours. It might be different if I was unemployed and trying to stretch every last dollar.
This is a like someone asking you to imagine that someone builds a small store across the street from a huge, discount supermarket or warehouse club. The small store has limited selection and often charges two times the price as its larger neighbors. No one would shop there right? Wrong. Convenience stores do well all across this great land because people often need things in the middle of the night or just can’t be bothered to make a special trip to save a dollar on a tube of toothpaste.
So if I’m reading you right, Shag, your objection is the time it takes to roll the coins and make a trip to the bank every once in a while? You may be overestimating the amount of time involved.
Dropping the coins into the sorting machine takes no more time than it would to drop them into a jar. And once a tube is full, it takes 30 seconds at most to slip the coins into a paper roll and fold over the ends. I just checked, and at the moment I have 26 rolls of coins with a value of $97.50. So I may have spent 13 minutes over the past six or eight months rolling coins. Maybe your time is a lot more valuable than mine, but I don’t consider that an onerous burden.
As for the bank, mine happens to be less than a ten minute walk from my home, and I go there regularly for business anyway. But if yours isn’t as conveniently located, there’s no reason in the world you have to go to a bank to get rid of your rolled coin. Take one or two rolls to the store once in a while and spend them like any other form of money. I routinely put rolls of quarters in my glove compartments to pay parking meters and car washes.
But if you’re the kind of person who lights his cigars with $10 bills, it’s no skin off my butt. 
See, you are describing all that is if it is nothing but I am having visions of building the Great Wall of China with a spoon. Buy the sorting machine, make sure my daughter doesn’t destroy the wrappers (hopeless), find a safe place to keep the rolls (from my daughter), find out the bank hours, drive down there, stand in a bank line for the first time in many months, fill out a deposit slip, swipe my ATM card and enter my pin (because they won’t even look at you otherwise), get dirty looks from the teller, deposit my $77.32.
I don’t know about you but I get tired just thinking about all that. It seems one step above my wife’s uncle who will back up on a 4-lane highway to pick up a can. Honestly, CoinStar machines have their problems as well. I have had them jam several times and had to get a 16 year supermarket bagger to come up with some ingenious scheme to get it to work again.
This had me thinking of a business idea. Laziness is the big reason why CoinStar machines do well but they don’t take the concept far enough. What we need is a service where a “financial conversion specialist” meets people in their own homes to sort the coins and convert them into cold, hard cash (conversion fee is .40 on the dollar, $100 minimum).
A while back there was a thread in which I bragged how I’d figured out what to do with my change. Take it to the local grocery store which has those new “self check-out” lanes. Screw the guy waiting in line behind me. They take change and if you really think the self check-out lane is faster you deserve to get stuck behind me while I feed $10 in change into the machine.
But anyway, I was quickly corrected by some Dopers that in fact, banks do still take & count your change.
Well, that was news to me. For about 10 years I’d been under the impression pretty much all banks stopped taking & counting change. I figured I didn’t have much choice but to get fucked by CoinStar. My bank wouldn’t even give me the coin rolls. I had to buy them at some place like Wal-Fart.
I’m glad to hear there are banks which will take & count your change, but I can understand why there are lots of people who think CoinStar is the only way to exchange their coinage.
As for those Amazon gift certificate things, damn that’s genius. Instead of depositing and saving your money, you have to spend it. And as someone else pointed out, a certain percent of people will forget about/lose their certificates and CoinStar/Amazon totally make out.
I would imagine so. I don’t think Coinstar is going to offer advertising for those other retailers for free. They’re getting a piece of pie regardless. I’m surprised the recieipts don’t have advertising on them as well (or maybe they do?).
This is certainly my excuse. I have a milk glass bowl on a shelf in my living room and my husband and I toss our change into it. I do have a bank account, of course, but it’s at a credit union and the nearest branch is 20 miles away from my home. So for me to cash in my change at my bank, I’d have to count and roll the damned stuff, load it into my car and haul it all the hell-and-gone to Norfolk – possibly encountering traffic at the bridge-tunnel either going or coming, and stand in line for however long that takes – and I’ve never been in the NFCU when there wasn’t at least a short line.
No thanks.
Instead, I’ve been dumping it into a paper sack and taking it to the CoinStar machine at the nearest Food Lion when I’m making a trip there anyway. It’s fun to dump the coins in the hopper and listen to it all go chinga-chinga-ching.
The 8.9 % is a bit steep, of course, but I’m paying for the convenience – and a little bit for the chinga-chinga-ching. Anyway, I hadn’t known about the gift certificate thing. I just checked and the Krogers nearest me offers the Amazon ecertificates. So from now on, I’ll go to Krogers instead of Food Lion. It’s a little farther away, but not much. And I’ll get my chinga-chinga-ching (and my coins turned into cash) for free.
I’ve never taken loose change to the bank, but I’ve taken many pounds of rolled coins. The only one that ever refused to take them was my credit union, that has a free CoinStar machine in the lobby.
Is it legal for a bank to refuse legal tender?
My only complaint with Coinstar is this: though they say outright what their fees are, and that is perfectly fair as far as it goes, they do NOT tell you that if you put in a silver dime, quarter or dollar, or a very old coin with different dimensions somehow by accident, it won’t even count toward your total, it will fall into a can inside the bowels of the machine and become the property of Coinstar. They could have the machine give those coins back to you, but they don’t.
Fortunately, my bank (a credit union) has a coin-counting machine. I recently took in about 30 lbs of coins and cashed it out…about $225 worth. It was fun dumping all the coins in, paper tube by paper tube, and fun knowing people were watching with envy (so I fantasized) as I got to shake the hopper and push more and more coins down the chute…not because of the money, but because it was simply fun.
I believe you can get Starbucks cards from our local Coinstar machines, but if you cash out, it’s 17%, not 9% as someone said. I’d have lost nearly $40 on the deal if I’d used Coinstar, so it was worth the drive to the bank branch.
The reason I’ve used this service in the past is that I work in the boonies. The banks are open while I’m in work and it’s about a 45-minute round trip to get to my nearest branch. Whereas the supermarket and its Coinstar equivalent is open until 10pm every night. It’s 7% commission here, or you can hit a button to donate the entire amount to charity.
Slight digression here, but reading all these responses and seeing what a hassle the whole thing is I can’t help but think - why do so many people even bother with change in the first place? How about this - don’t buy things with cash?
Not only do you get a number of benefits (secure transactions that can be disputed, cashback/rewards, float period on payment, etc.) but you don’t get all those piles of frickin’ change!!!
Coinstar be damned, problem solved. (for me anyway. The rest of you can continue your toils in Babylon as you like ;))
What does this mean?
I don’t know about others in this thread, but I hate paying for small items with a card, some stores near me don’t even take cards, and in the UK, pubs prefer cash too.
I’m with you! I never use cash unless I absolutely have to. And if that comes up, I have to make a trip to the ATM because I never have more than 5-20 dollars in my wallet. I never deal with change or coins.