I work at a bank. If your bank gives you stress about taking coin, you should close all of your accounts at that bank by cash or cashiers check and call the boss afterward to tell them why you did. Keep your money someplace where people are nice to you!
If you bring me a bucket of coin, I’m delighted to take it and it’s fairly likely to wreck my workday. There are a lot of reasons why.
When you drop a penny on the street, you lose a cent. When I drop a penny, I don’t balance. Loose coin from a customer in quantity means I probably won’t balance. If I were dishonest and took a penny out of my pocket in order to balance, I would lose my job. Loose coin isn’t loose coin; it’s usually US currency and bonus arcade tokens, 20c pieces from a country that no longer exists, paper clips, and (honest-to-god) a couple toenails.
Exceptional people do not try to deposit toenails at the bank. Exceptional people drop coin off and pick up their folding money in the afternoon or tomorrow morning instead of waiting around for it. There is less risk of a loss or correction on both sides when you leave your currency and walk away–just like night drop.
The opportunity cost of accepting coin where I work is almost certainly higher than the losses taken from cashing bad checks. Here’s one recent example. A customer came by on a busy day with quite a bit of coin at 10:30 AM. We didn’t finish counting it until 3:30 or so. The math didn’t work, then the recounts didn’t work, the boss took it over even though there were the infamous recent credit card frauds to deal with, there was too much silver in it to accept ethically, and every other little thing. Compare the value of all transactions going through a bank in one business day to a three figure change order on a busy Friday. It’s insane. (By the way, we were fathoms more than friendly to him despite complaining while he wasn’t there, because we are a bank and taking money is the job.)
I used to think that Coinstar was a scam. The cut they take is, everything considered, very generous.
Bankers or tellers? In my experience, bankers sound smarmy, because they are essentially working in sales, and need to make that quota.
Ah, gotcha. I was thinking either: machine outside, or rolls behind the counter.
Honest question: do you mean they’ve had coin counting machines for decades? Because I haven’t noticed, but then where I’m from seems different than other places. E.g. we didn’t and AFAIK don’t have drivethrough ATMs whereas other places have had them for awhile.
I used to work in a bank. If you base your entire working relationship with possibly an international bank with tens of thousands of employees on one teller, then you need to chill out, complain to a higher up, and change your relationship only if you aren’t given some minimum of attention. But a single branch manager isn’t going to get too beat up if you left, especially if you already made the decision.
Yep, not going to complain about your bucket, but me or my boss wouldn’t be very happy to spend lots of time sorting your filthy lucre. And my boss’ boss will only care about how much the line is backed up and make it a big deal without talking directly to the customer.
IIRC (your bank may be very different), I got some incentive (forget what, gift card after a few per quarter?) for balancing to the penny, absolutely no issues or complaints from higher ups if I balanced to < ~3.00, but would get immediately fired if I was out some huge amount (> 1,000 or something). Everything else would be investigated but not necessarily a problem immediately, e.g. let a counterfeit $20 get in your pool, might get a talking to, but not discipline if it’s not frequent.
Coin counting machines are disappearing from banks. The last time I asked about depositing coins at a branch of the bank I work for, they offered a bag that I could put the coins into with a deposit ticket, and they’d be shipped off to the local cash vault facility for counting.
I got the sense that they offered this option only because I work there, but this was a branch that had no merchant services. I may have had different results at a more merchant-focused location, but ever since I found Coinstar gives 100% on Amazon cards, I’ve never looked back.
Thank you. Same here. ALL of the self check out lanes have one-coin-at-a-time slots.
It would take forever to put a significant amount in.
I put coins in my car ashtray and in a little dish on my nightstand. After a couple of months They’re both overflowing. I used to put my coins in piggy banks for my siblings kids, but they’re all grown now. So now I’m back to cashing them in.
I’ve heard that some grocery stores have installed their own machines and pay out 100% on them. This is profitable for them because otherwise, they’d have to buy bulk coins at higher than face value. Plus, of course, it’s something that customers like, which can lead to more customers.
The amusement park I worked at we had dozens of vending machines and such scattered around the park as well as a propensity for being on the receiving end of many coins from customer transactions. The owners created an “exchange fund” for managers doing the deposits and such to dump excess coins into. Basically there was a cash box in one of our safes that was expected to balance against a bunch of bags of loose coins so if a customer came in with $23 in loose coins we happily took it, counted it up and sold it to the coin pile.
Every couple months we would run the bags through a coin sorter and counter. We had cloth bags with little crimp on seals and the bag was some specified amount the bank wanted like $1000 in quarters or $500 in nickels something like that. We then took those to the bank.
Thanks for your insights, ALOHA HATER, that’s interesting and helpful. MY bank still does coin-counting, and will let me deposit it or give me bills, and it usually only takes a few minutes (depends on what I bring in, I suppose, a jar or a ten-gallon jug.) I’ve had to occasional odd bit (arcade token) get mixed in, and felt embarrassed about it, but didn’t realize how much extra time that takes.
My sister-in-law banks at the same company (rhymes with Face) in Cleveland, and her bank doesn’t have a machine any more.
I had this problem many years ago with a small local bank. Now I’m with Chase and, much as I don’t like them for other reasons, they’ve been unfailingly polite and cheerful about taking my glass pumpkin full of coins once a year or so.
Although after ALOHA HATER’s post, I’m reconsidering that, because I’m a nice person and would really hate for someone to get disciplined or worse simply because my pocket lint messed something up. The machine is good at returning paper clips and buttons (yes, really, sorry!) but since I don’t visually inspect every coin I’m handed in change, there very well may be the odd token or foreign coin getting through. I don’t really think a token is going to break Chase, but it sounds like it might break an individual teller, and that’s unfortunate. I’d rather banks change their policy about that, but since I have no control over that, I may have just become a Coinstar customer.
the last time I took coins to my bank, the teller informed me they don’t take rolled coins any more. She commented that in order to count the pennies, she would have to unroll them all. Sigh. I kind of like the ritual of counting up the pennies and filling the little tubes. Another tradition falling to the god of efficiency.
As for the bank being annoyed about taking coins, I find that if you leave the sack of coins with the teller so that they can deal with them at their leisure, they are much friendlier about it.
Back in the day when I deposited coins, they had to open the rolls, too. But that didn’t stop them from accepting them. They’d break them open and pour them in the machine. They did discourage us from using them, but they didn’t forbid it.
The Coinstar machines have a minimum for the gift cards, $20 I think. That would be a great way to set yourself an Amazon gift card balance to chip away at w/ orders or gifts and such.
Our self-checkouts have the one-at-a-time coin slots; but if it’s really quiet I’ll use that to get rid of all my pennies at once. I put the silver coins aside until I take my metal recycling in and then use them to round up to the next dollar or so in order to be deposited in the ATM. And they ALWAYS want change at the recycler.
I agree; I cashed about fourteen dollars in coins last year at Coinstar and took the money in the form of an Amazon gift card. (Not literally a gift card, though. It was just a code that I entered on the sites to apply against an order.)
Look upthread; ALOHA HATER works at a bank and explained how it works at his/her bank. Other banks may have a simpler process. And some banks have self-service coin counting machines, although they may limit their use to customers.
I just checked the Coinstar website. There is a minimum amount but the exact number varies, depending on which company’s gift cards you choose. The highest minimum I found was for Southwest Airlines, at $25 but many were at $5, including Amazon.com.
My credit union has a coin counter available for member use. In order to use it fee-free, I have to insert my debit card, and the money gets deposited directly into my account. If I want it back in folding paper, I have to make a withdrawal in a separate transaction, but I usually don’t. It saves time and money because I don’t have to use a teller’s time to do what a machine can do.
Have you asked the bank manager why they’re asking for this extra information? My WAGs are that the bank has some sort of internal reporting process, or that tellers are required to ask for ID and SSN on every transaction to make sure that the information is obtained for those transactions that actually require it.
The bank tellers at my current bank just accept whatever I say for the number of coins if it’s just a roll. They don’t even put them through machine (at least while I’m there), and I don’t have to provide I.D. either.
Wow, what banks do you folks go to that even have these machines? I used to use Coinstar machines to get Amazon gift cards, but then developed the idea that this could be unduly influencing me to buy something from Amazon. So, last summer, with a 2-year buildup of change to get rid of, I called my bank’s headquarters (KeyBank) and asked if there were any branches that had coin counting machines where I could deposit it. They told me no, I’d have to roll the change myself. So I stopped by my local branch where I was at least able to get some free rolls, and painstakingly rolled it all–90 some dollars worth. They accepted the rolled coins without complaint.
For a long time, though, I really just wanted to be able to carry the jar in, hand it over to them, and have it deposited. I know TD Bank makes a point of having self-serve coin counting machines, free to account holders, in every branch, but AFAIK there’s nothing like that around here.