We save it all either in the car or in a jar in the house and cash it in once every two months or so. I usually pay for MOST stuff with a Debit Card so we don’t generate a whole lot of change, but husband hates the card and will do anything to avoid it - he’s the change generator.
To be fair, most banks also charge merchants to deposit cash into their account. That cash must be counted, stored, transported, etc. It’s either rolled into the monthly fee paid to the bank or, in the case of an “analyzed” account, itemized with other services used and charged at a predetermined rate. Depending on the amount of cash deposited, fee structure, balance kept in the account and other factors, depositing cash can be more expensive than card swipe charges.
That said, payment processors charge a higher swipe fee for credit card processing than for debit cards. For that reason, merchants really appreciate it when you use your debit card in “debit” mode.
I will be the oddball here and admit that I dislike it when people pay the exact amount in coinage when at a register.
I know that since everyone here are dopers, we are all above average, and we all take less than 3.5 seconds to count out that exact change.
BUT, the old people in front of me that take the time to get out their coin purse and count out 73 cents take forever (“Where did that dime go, I know I have one in here”). If you make eye contact with the lady/man behind the register, they will usually roll their eyes at this point.
Sorry, I had to admit it.
I’m the the selfish impatient guy who pays with a card. Swipe, it’s done. Next customer please.
Sure, and everyone’s prices are higher because of that. So it’s to my advantage to use the card (and receive its associated benefits, like FF miles and not having to periodically visit an ATM to withdraw cash) whenever I can. If I pay cash, I pay the same price, and I don’t receive those benefits. In other words, cash users are subsidizing my vacation travel. Thanks, suckers!
On those rare occasions when I pay cash for something and receive coins as part of the change, quarters go into my car for feeding parking meters (the meters in town now take credit cards, but these transactions are agonizingly slow, so I use quarters instead). Pennies, nickels and dimes get spent as soon as possible, i.e. at the next cash transactions. I may or may not provide exact change, but I try to at least reduce my coin count.
Counting coins on the counter of the 7-11,
From a quarter past six 'til a quarter to seven,
The manager, Bevan, starts to abuse me
Hey man, I just want some Muesli
“Inner City Pressure”
Flight of the Conchords.
It wasn’t not the right thing to do, but it was, quite honestly, kind of obnoxious. It’s not that your server wasn’t happy to get the money, because I guarantee they were, but big tips in coins are something of a pain in the ass to deal with. None of the restaurants I ever worked in had anywhere for staff to truly secure their belongings–we sometimes had lockers, but weren’t allowed to use locks in case we were up to shenanigans (the chain place only allowed transparent purses so they could see what we were carrying out with us)–so you can’t just dump them in your purse or locker. Management usually wouldn’t allow more than a roll’s worth of any coin in the register at any given time, so you couldn’t usually unload more than a couple dollars of coins there. So we wound up lugging them around in our aprons all night. And then counting your tips to declare for the shift takes forever because counting change is an inherently slower process than counting the same amount of money in bills.
Then too, you’re just taking all the issues you didn’t want to have to deal with and shoving them off on someone else. You didn’t want to have to lug around all that weight, but that change weighs the exact same amount in the server’s pocket. You didn’t want to have to hold up the line counting out 43 cents, but since tips are the server’s paycheck he’s standing there in line counting out a few dollars in change. Or having to cart it to the bank to get counted and put in his account/changed for bills.
It’s not offensive, but it’s most assuredly a pain in the ass. Granted, most servers would vastly prefer the pain in the ass to getting stiffed. Still, I can understand someone finding the “This stuff is too big a pain in the ass for me to deal with, but not too big a pain in the ass for* you*” attitude inherent in giving a large tip in pocket change offensive.
For you, maybe. I always get behind the person who has never seen a card reader before, or the one who can’t remember her pin but has it written on a scrap of paper squirreled away in this pocket of the wallet. No, not that pocket, must be the other pocket. Oh drat, where is that thing? I know I had it here somewhere. Ah, there it is. Oh, dear, I’ve hit wrong button…
We used to put it all in a jar and when it got full cash it in and go to the casino and blow it on dinner and the slot machines. That would be about once every couple of years. Big spenders, heh.
I carry a little in my handbag and the rest I put in a piggy bank. When the bank is full now I give it to my bachelor son. I think he secretly rolls his eyes but he never says, “No.”
A lot of places have cans by the register where you can donate to local charities. So some of my change gets dumped there. Apparently a lot also ends up underneath the clothes dryer.
Note that people are talking about two different things in this thread: leaving a tip that includes coins, and leaving a tip that is all coins.
(Note also that the issues you mentioned about dealing with a large amount of coinage would be even worse if we commonly used dollar coins in the US, which I suppose is an argument against them.)
I was in DC the last time there were serious efforts to replace the dollar bill with dollar coins, and the Metro was plastered with anti-coin ads. Out of general curiosity I did a little internet research and found out that the entity funding the ads was the company that supplies currency paper to the Treasury. If anyone wonders why there’s such opposition to dollar coins, now you know; someone’s making money from the status quo.
Several types of one dollar coins are currently not only in circulation but also in production; the number of coins churned out each year by the mint is not very large (37 million in 2013, compared to 1.5 billion quarters and almost 7 billion pennies; source), and surely a great deal of that ends up in collections rather than in circulation, but still. They work just fine on many vending machines and usually on public transportation (which is, incidentally, why one of my first cash transactions on my last visit to the U.S. involved dollar coins.
It’s interesting to see the resistance the American public shows against efforts to replace the $1 bill with a coin. Internationally, there is a clear trend towards getting rid of low-denomination banknotes - the British one and two pound coins are recent examples, even though some Scottish banks apparently still print one pound notes. The eurozone never even bothered with one and two euro banknotes and introduced these denominations as coins straightaway. Of course, the rationale for this is cost saving - it’s actually quite expensive to periodically replace worn banknotes, whereas coins last for decades. Things may change if the polymer banknotes spread, however; I would suppose that they will drastically reduce the frequency with which banknotes must be replaced.
I hate coin change. I pay with credit card except for the rare occasions when I go to a drive thru (McDonalds or Dunkin Donut) At the drive thru’s if the coin change is less than 50 cents I give it as a tip; although at McD’s they do not have a tip cup and refuse it. Even though I keep some loose change in the car I never have the right amount for the tab; so I end up with more change. My bank will not take it unless it is rolled and I have no idea where to purchase the paper tube things. The spare coins have been collecting in a plastic bag for years.
I just off loaded over 38 dollars worth to a conistar machine in exchange for an amazon gift card in the exact amount I dropped in. I have now swore off drive thru’s and plan to never touch another coin. 
In the states, coins are not useful to pay for anything but the most trivial purchases, like time in a parking meter. Even the smallest normal purchase requires a fistful of our worthless coins.
Coins are “change”, not “money”, they exist to round out a transaction that is made with money.
If it were up to me, we would have $.25, $1, $2 and $5 coins, along side of $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills. One might even be able to pay for an entire hot dog with a coin or two, shocking!
This is how I see it.
Coins are not useful as money to me because they are not useful for anything I purchase (I have a washing machine and our parking meters have CC slots).
In my opinion, there are only two other reasons why people use them to purchase something from a store:
-
The customer is “older” and still thinks of them as money because they used to be worth something 40-50 years ago. They still count them out and use them to pay for things.
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People give them to the cashier in order to prevent getting more of them! In other words, the coins are so worthless that people are eager to give them away so that they don’t have to get more coins!
Some examples - I think a quarter will now buy you a hair less than five minutes on the meter at UCLA. No wonder they use pay stations and CC/bill acceptors now.
Or you could buy 00:01:15 minutes on the air and water vending machine at the gas station. (Although the clerk will almost always let you use it for free if you’re also buying gas.)
(Speaking of nearly worthless coins Schnitte may find this amusing, provided he’s old enough. When I had my year in Goettingen, back when multi-cellular animal life was just beginning to take shape, the RA on my floor of the dormitory told me it cost “elf Groschen” (eleven Groschen) to run the washing machine. I had only heard of Austrian Groschen, which were essentially their version of a cent–1/100 of a Schilling. So I assumed that Germans likewise used the word Groschen to mean 1/100 of a Mark, or one Pfennig.
So how and where was I supposed to feed 0,11DM into the washing machine? And damn! that seemed surprisingly inexpensive, I must say!
Much forehead smacking ensued after I learned that a Groschen was the ten-Pfennig coin.)
Today, I paid for a $15 transaction with a $50. No biggie, but when I cashed a $175 check, to which they charge $1 to process, I added $6, to get a round $180.I also had lots of coins when I picked up stuff, and lunch. I added extra coins to the bills, to make my change less cumbersome.
I’m old enough to have been around, and using money, before the introduced the euro (I was born in 1983), and I know (and knew back then) the word “Groschen” in the sense of a ten-pfennig coin; but as far back as I can remember, that was indeed a nearly worthless coin. Still, you could put it into vending machines. Actually, the lowest denomination vending machines typically accept in Germany today is five cents European, which pretty exactly matches the face value of the pre-2002 German Groschen.
Collect in a bowl and dole out to grandchildren when appropriate. Although a waiter might sneer at a pile of nickels, that’s cash money to a 6 year old.
Even in the UK, which has coins up to £2 (currently about $3.30), a lot of people don’t see change as “real money”.
However it is nice when you look in your wallet and see you have no banknotes, but then check the coin pocket and find you actually do have enough money to buy your lunch, or a couple of pints, or whatever.
What I usually do is empty out everything smaller than 20p into a change jar each night. Coins of 20p and up stay in my wallet, and even if I have £7 or £8 in there it doesn’t make it too bulky.
I made the point in another thread that it’s useful having coins that are actually worth something. Shopping trolleys often take £1 coins, which are enough of an incentive to recover that people will return them. I gather in the US they take quarters (~15 pence) which is barely worth the hassle to retrieve.
Quarters I keep in the car. The rest I use to promote inflation by throwing it in the garbage. (Note to those who will be peeved: I only started doing this when 99% of my transactions became card-based. I probably toss about $1.00 a year at this point.)