Not all banks. I read this same advice right here on the Dope a while back and was tickled to take a pillowcase of change from three separate jars in our house to Bank of America where they laughed me to scorn.
Correct.
The Coinstar at my supermarket has an option to get essentially a gift card for that store. I find that more convenient that carrying lots of coins around. Every six months I just dump the jar I keep at home to the store.
^^This. Either a Vons gift card or an Amazon one. Either way I get full value for my change and I don’t have to go to the bank, which charges me a nickel for every roll over 5.
Not only do different banks have different policies, but different branches, and even different individual employees can have different policies.
I have witnessed an argument between a bank teller and a bank manager over whether the account number should be written on the rolls.
I have also had a bank tell me that I couldn’t roll my coins, only to tell me when I brought in my loose coins that they needed to be rolled (apparently they had tried out one of those coin sorting machines, but decided to remove it).
So the only way to find out is to ask at the individual branch.
Nice.
If you have some patience, even if your self-checkout lane has the slot, it’s a good way to get rid of several dollars worth of change at a time. There’s no one person behind you giving you the evil eye, and it counts them for you. Over time, you can whittle away at your coins.
Up until about a year ago I was a bank teller at Royal Bank of Canada and we would only accept coins if they were rolled (if you had enough to make a roll). We never opened the rolled coins and passed them on to the next guy who came in wanting a roll of coins. While I worked there we never had a complaint from someone saying they’d been short changed from the roll we gave them and we never got a roll with a coin at each end and fake stuffing in the middle.
After handling them so often you get used to the weight and height that they should be. We also didn’t charge people for exchanging their coins for bills.
We also never said no to anyone with coins no matter how many rolls they had. Sometimes people would come in with boxes of rolled coins. Especially the Salvation Army at Christmas.
Is this at a restaurant? Why not just cash-out at the register at the end of the day?
Well, I do. What’s wrong with a bucket?
The reason banks don’t want rolled coins is they hand out rolls to merchants, and if they don’t unroll them and roll them up again, they run the risk of someone giving them a roll of slugs and a customer getting stuck and mad. But if they have to unroll to verify, that’s just extra work.
They also don’t like account numbers on them for the same reason – they don’t want to hand out a roll to customer B with customer A’s account on them.
My bank will take coins anyway I give them, but the bank knows me, and the chances of my feeding them a roll of slugs is pretty slim.
Bolding mine.
I don’t allow my coins to accumulate and carry about a $1 in coin and try to pay with exact change as often as possible. My purpose in carrying change is to prevent accumulating even more change that I’d have to deal with later. I usually place my pocket change on my dresser at the end of the day and if I have more then 4 pennies sitting there for a while, I simply throw the excess away which is about 50 cents a year.
My credit union has a free coin counter for members. I just cashed in a couple of gallons of coins (carried there in a bucket, yes) and got a little over $500 back.
Your best bet is to find a bank with a coin counting machine in the lobby. One of the local branches of my bank has one. It’s free for account holders and charges 5% for non-account holders. You just dump your coins in and it spits out a receipt that you bring to the teller. I work at Dunkin Donuts and get at least $600 a month in coin from my tips. If the coin machine wasn’t available at my bank, I would find a bank that had one and switch my accounts over. CoinStar takes too much out if you want the cash (9% I think) and I have no use for thousands of dollars in gift cards. Also if the CoinStar machine breaks down I’m not sure the store employees can fix it. They have to call the company that administers the machines to come out and fix the problem. I’ve seen some pissed off people at the grocery store getting shortchanged when the machine dies before they get their receipt or gift card. At least the tellers at the bank know how to fix the machine when it breaks, which is quite often. All the tellers hate me (except the really cute one!!) because I save my tips for months at a time and cash it all in at once. During one cash-in I broke the machine three times and filled it twice causing the tellers to have to leave their work and deal with it. I now try to go when the cute girl is working, she likes dealing with me and the coin machine.
You know, I thought of that. I just heard this afternoon on the radio that B of A is instituting a $5/month fee for using your debit card for purchases.
So let’s review. “You can avoid the per check fee by using your debit card.” and “Used your debit card? that’ll be $5”…apparently whether you use it once or eleventy million times in that month.
Wow, thanks for all the great feedback, gang! Hub is anti Coinstar due to their charges, and I agree with the poster who said not interested in tons of gift cards. There are a lot of good suggestions and anecdotal stories here ~ we use a credit union, but they don’t have a local branch, which is only a pain once in a great while. So, we’ll noodle these ideas and give some a try! Great discussion 
I get the anti-Coinstar sentiment, but note that they also often run promotions by which you can get a “bonus” for turning in a bunch of coins at once. It won’t help if you are 100% against gift cards, but in the past they’ve offered a $50 gift card for $40 in coins, available for a handful of different merchants, including (sometimes) amazon
Interesting to see the different attitude of US banks compared to here in the UK. It’s no problem depositing coins but only if they are bagged up (equivalent of “rolled” - we don’t use rolls, but little plastic bags).
Each bag will hold, say, £1 in 1p coins, £20 in £1 coins, or whatever (but never mixed coins) and when you take them into the bank they’ll throw the bag on a scale to check the right amount is in there.