An unanticipated, but in hindsight inevitable consequence of having currency best described as virtually worthless metal disks. Everyone is forced to collect these disks, store them at home until they have the critical mass necessary to make turning them into actual money a worthwhile task. Throw in COVID, we are more hesitant to make trips to the bank, and the critical mass goes up substantially, so we all let our collections grow.
No doubt our feckless leaders will “solve” this problem by making even more worthless metal disks to fill our piggy banks.
Except you can’t get to the bank coin machine because the lobbies are closed and the banks are drive-thru only, which usually don’t accept large amounts of loose coin…
Also, the CoinStar machine at my store was shut down for months because of covid, and that sort of machine is a significant way coins get back to the bank.
Coin shortages were not an anticipated problem of a pandemic. While we’ll know better for next time meanwhile with have to cope with what’s going on today.
What do you mean? I can buy a cup of coffee or something similar using metal coins, therefore they are actual money and not worthless, and at the same time I do not store bags full of coins at home to take to the bank, because why would I do that.
Well, you CAN do it. Back a 100 years ago, with the exact same coins in common circulation as today, you could buy a coffee with a nickel. One coin, the second smallest in circulation. Today, you’d need more than 10 coins, if they’re the highest value coin in common circulation. Who keeps a dozen quarters in their pocket on the chance they will buy a coffee and nothing else?
While you do not store bags of coins at home, you are the outlier… proof being our current shortage of coins. Coins last for 50 years, we make billions of them every single year, and more and more transactions are cashless, yet we no longer have enough supply. They are being removed from circulation by everyone else’s bags of coins.
Wow. I’ve always had a container of some sort that I’ve tossed any coins into at the end of the day. I bought my first kayak with $800 worth of those coins. Looks like I might be selling my current coins to my business. I wonder if I can get away with charging a premium for them.
Your self-checkout machines have about five thousand dollars in paper money in them? How often do they get emptied? That seems like a lot to accumulate over the course of a day or even a week.
As a kid I collected coins along with friends. One guy was home sick so his mother brought him $50 worth of pennies to look through. He found a couple that he did not have . Don’t recall how long it took him.
No idea what happened to all the pennies I collected as a kid. It was easy to find pretty old ones back then, but if I had any valuable ones I wouldn’t have known it. I have no idea what happened to those book things where you could fill in the holes with pennies from every year.
The machine starts with a base amount of around $1500 in combined bills and coins. On a busy day they can easily accumulate 3-4k (due to location some are more likely to do this than others). They’re emptied every other day. So all of those machines had been accumulating money for two days and were emptied, including the “base” amount. Actually, one of them had closer to 7k in it. While it’s not common for one of the machines to do 5k in a day it certainly has happened, usually on holiday weekends.
The week before Christmas the self-serves can build up to near 10k between servicing and our daily cash deposits can hit six digits on a frequent basis. That’s why my store is not doing away with cash any time soon - too much cash business.
Yep, cash is still a big deal. About 1/3 of our transactions involve cash last time I checked although it’s possible that has dropped to 1/4. We try to accommodate everyone - WIC, SNAP, credit, debit, check, cash, gift cards…
This is causing some of the end-times wackadoodles to say that this is just another method to inch us towards a cashless society, and of course “The Mark.”
For those of you who work with coin-counting machines: What happens when an old penny or other coin goes through the slot? Some of the old pennies are MUCH heavier than the newly minted ones; do they use a laser, or count by weight, or what?
I have two ways to count coins. One is by weight, the other is by size/shape. Once in awhile either machine will kick out a coin due to a variation in weight (as you note) or shape (mutilation). The machines allow for some variation so slightly damaged and very old money still gets counted in most cases. The really bad coins (and bills) I get to hand-count but since there aren’t a lot it’s not a big deal.
Half dollars and all dollar coins of all eras get kicked out and counted by hand.
Foreign money gets kicked out and chucked in a small bucket. We’ve accumulated quite a bit over the years, but not enough to turn in as the conversion fees would exceed the worth of the coins and bills. The bills go up on a bulletin board in the office, and some of them are actually no longer valid currency like the pre-euro French francs. The paper Canadian dollars I think are no longer valid, either.
Paper Canadian $1 and $2 bills are still valid currency, but will be sent back to the Bank of Canada as “no longer fit for circulation” when received by a bank.
Canada doesn’t seem to have any shortages, probably as we seem to be much less cash-dependent than the US. Personally, I haven’t paid for anything in cash since the pandemic began. I used debit for almost everything except lottery tickets and the odd on-the-go fast food lunch, and now have no occasion for the lunches and get my lottery tickets online. I throw any coin under $1 in a can on my dresser at the end of the day, and cash them in when it’s full (which usually takes a couple of years). I have noticed that local CoinStar machines are all marked as out of service, possibly because of CoVid precautions.
My bank no longer takes loose change. It has to be rolled. The teller told me none of the banks around here do it anymore but he thought maybe some credit unions still do.
If I see a dollar coin in a change tray, or the cash box at the self-service library bookstore where I volunteer, I ask to buy it. Never had anyone turn me down.
We sometimes get things that aren’t valid currency, like Chuck E. Cheese tokens (if we get those, we offer them to the staff who may want them for grand/children) and play money. Also, for a while, someone (we did eventually find out who) was paying for her books with silver spoons. Long story made short: They weren’t especially valuable, so we took them to the auctioneer we use for appropriate things when I delivered a carload to him.
