On my way home from work I stopped at the liquor store for vodka (somebody drank all my Tito’s). While I was paying, a sign was being put up that read:
“Due to the national shortage of coins, all sales debit card, credit card, or exact change.”
WTF? My business has had no difficulty getting change at the bank. This was a state run business that should know what’s going on. I’m wondering if someone sent the liquor store manager an article from The Onion or something.
Hah! I guess my polar water bottle of coins might come in handy. 
For the good of the nation, cash in those coins.
They might finally be worth something!
The mini-mart and the liquor store were both asking people to use exact change if they wanted to use cash. There is probably a lot of coin tied up in closed businesses and unserviced vending machines, but the real mother lode is in various jars, bottles, trays, and drawers in people’s homes. I think we could drag up $100 at my house.
It’s finally happened. COTU#1 and COTU#2 have countless piggy banks that have been inhaling our change since the first COTU was born.
It’s our fault.
I’ll talk to Mr VOW about the best way to get all that coinage back in service.
~VOW
It’s real. Our bank notified us two weeks ago. Of our past five orders for coins from the bank two were only half filled and the most recent three simply weren’t filled at all.
I just put in an 11 hour day helping to convert our self-serve checkouts to card-only. (it’s not as simple as you might think.)
Much of it is because bank and credit union storefronts are not open to cash in coins. Oh, sure, there’s Coinstar and the like, but they do charge a rather hefty fee unless you want a gift card, usually from Amazon.
You may want to check with your local bank branch first, but many have coin counting machines they’ll run them through. And then you can deposit the money into accounts for the beneficiaries that will at least earn them a small amount of interest.
As far as Coinstar machines that someone else brought up[1], those often being in locked-down stores is one of the causes of the coin shortage.
[1] I haven’t bothered to find out how to quote more than one post on this new board
The same way you quote one post, but do it twice. Or thrice. Or however many times.
The Coinstar machine in my local supermarket was full for weeks during the earlier part of this crisis, so people couldn’t even cash in their coins, even if they were willing to pay the fee. (And, by the way, if you’re willing to take the value in the form of an Amazon gift code, or one from other vendors, you could get 100% of the value of the coins.)
There was another thread about this a few weeks ago, but I can’t find it now.
I’ve had the same deja vu feeling about some thread subjects. I think in some cases, I may be remembering one of the threads from the in-between time.
My daughter is Teller Manager of a local bank. I asked her and she said that this is true, there is a shortage. I asked her if there was a plan in place and she said “yes, we are hoping for the best.”
How many self-checkouts do you have? We have six at the store I work at and I’m certain I could set them all to card-only in less than 11 minutes.
We had a thread about this a week or two ago and I mentioned that I buy a lot of change for my store and hadn’t heard anything yet. I’ve since heard something. In fact, within a day or two of mentioning that, I was at the bank and the teller gave me a heads up about it. And I’m now having a really difficult time buying change. A few days ago, for example, I needed $300 in quarters and $25 in pennies (a box). I had to go to 3 branches (and two different banks) and managed to get $100 in quarters and $5 in pennies. I don’t know how many they have on hand, but they’re rationing them.
And to make it even worse, I had to wait in the drive through of all three banks. I don’t know how many of you have been to a drive through bank in the last 3 months, but they’re an absolute nightmare. I go to the bank one or two times a day, every day but Sunday and it’s typically anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour to get through the line.
Now, I don’t have an answer here, but you’d think in 3 months, banks would have found a way to get people moving through those lanes faster. I’d love for them to have a lane dedicated to “I have everything ready, I don’t have any questions, I’ll send you the tube, you send the receipt back and I’ll be on my way”. The person in front of me today sent the tube back 6 times (after I started counting), I was behind him for over a half hour.
I think that might be the case here.
Yeah, there was a coin-shortage thread in Brigadoon. I’ve got a page saved showing some thread titles; there’s one called “Coins are the new toilet paper.”
We have 12
In order to set the machines to card only we have to (for security reasons) schedule two responsible people to purge all of the money from all the machines. The paper bills go pretty quick, but the coin takes longer and has to be placed in bags. The money that comes from each machine has to be kept separate for accounting reasons. There’s walking from machine to machine. But you’re right, that doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time, it was done in under an hour.
But I hadn’t even started yet.
Sure, we purge and audit those machines on a schedule any way - but we usually do it one at a time, not all 12 at once. We can’t just throw all the money in a bucket and say, oh, we’ll get around to it someday. After all that money is collected it has to be counted. That’s about 5k-6k for each machine with several hundred of it in loose coin. That’s what took all the time - on top of my already 8 hour day of routine duties.
Yes, we have automated counting machines - but not being a casino or bank we don’t have high-capacity high-speed ones. I had over 2,000 in loose quarters, which had to be documented, and then stored when normally we don’t store more than $10-20 in loose quarters, rinse and repeat for every denomination. Also, the software we use does not like deviation from routine, so there was a lot of work-arounds and consulting the instructions we’d been given.
So yeah, 3-4 hours on top of the normal 7-8 is indeed 11 hours.
Oh, and the whole time I was doing this I was interrupted multiple times because the lanes with humans were running out of change because of all the cash customers caught by surprise by this (doesn’t matter how often you warn people, they’re still surprised) diverted to those lanes, where we haven’t re-calibrated how much change we need for them based on new usage patterns. I dispense the change, but, again, there are procedures required and while none of them are arduous they add up over time, especially when interrupting the on-going count of a big pile of cash.
So, sure - you can flip a switch and the machines are card-only. Bravo. That’s ignoring everything else that goes on behind the scenes. Maybe your store will let the money just sit out there in the machine on the floor, but mine won’t. Either the money is “working” or it’s in the safe or on the way to the bank.
Also rinse and repeat for 250+ stores. That’s 4-5 people involved in each store at some point along the way, and the labor cost of controlling and processing all that. I have no idea how much work this will make for corporate accounting, but probably some. We’re not doing this conversion for kicks, it’s costing my company a bunch of time, money, and labor to pull this off.
It’s going to also cost time, money, and labor to reverse it when the coin shortage is alleviated. We’re not going to go cashless because 1/3 of our customer transactions involve cash.
So, sure, changing the machine to card-only is quick. The rest of it behind the scenes is not.