Free coin counting machines?

[o0dano0o.livejournal.com]

Hi All,

I was wondering if anyone knew of a free coin counting machine anywhere in the area. I know of the coinstar at the porter shaws, but that isn't free.

Thanks.

Comments

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

It *is* free if you are willing to convert your $$$ into gift cards.

[o0dano0o.livejournal.com]

Right - but what if you want cold hard casssh?

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Put the coins in rolls and take them to your bank.

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Councounting machines always take a fee for maintenance, but you can get coin rolls from the bank for free to roll yourself.

[spot.livejournal.com]

Why would anyone provide a free coin counting machine that did this? What possible economic benefit would it provide? The only reason I can think of why anyone would have such a public service would be as a loss leader to get you in the door, but those machines have a pretty high cost (not to mention a significant maintenance overhead from all the non-coin junk that people put in them).

You might try the local branch of your bank, assuming that you have a local bank, and not a super-mega bank. They may take pity on you and do a coins->bills conversion at no charge.

[secretlyironic.livejournal.com]

My old bank in Philly used to have those on hand for customers. But they did break a lot... because of all the junk people put in them.

[o0dano0o.livejournal.com]

I was going to say - growing up in VT, there was a machine at the bank you could use.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

Then you roll it up yourself and bring it to the bank.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

Commerce Bank in NYC does exactly this. As a benefit to customers/a draw to open an account there.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

Do you know anyone with a coin separator like this one (http://www.piggybankworld.com/Change-Wrapper-Bank-p-2071.html)? They can't handle as much at one time as a Coinstar machine, but they get the coins rolled pretty quickly, and then you can bring them to a bank.

[spot.livejournal.com]

I could see a bank having this service, since they need to perform this task as part of their normal business operations.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Vermont and I never saw one of these, and I used Chittenden until I left the state.

[ron_newman]

I tagged this "banking". See the last time this was asked.

[o0dano0o.livejournal.com]

sorry I didn't find that post - feel free to delete this one.

[ravenword.livejournal.com]

Bank of America was like "WTF?!" the last time I did this. But then, I brought in about a 20-lb. sack of rolled change.

[ron_newman]

Did they still take it?

[ravenword.livejournal.com]

They did, but they didn't seem pleased about it.

[ron_newman]

Unless (as pointed out above) you convert your coins to a gift card instead of cash. Here's CoinStar's list of gift cards. If you know you're going to spend money soon at Starbucks or Amazon or Borders or AMC Theatres anyway, you may as well take advantage of this.

[sekala.livejournal.com]

pretty much -- most banks don't even bother weighing the coins either, they just take you at your word that it's all there -- I just sit down in front of the tv for 30min and at the end of it I have $90 in coins (coffeeshop tips).

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Brookline Bank has a Coinstar-style machine (its actually cooler than that- it has a Finagle-A-Bagel-style conveyor belt, although with no buzzsaw) that counts money and totals it for you. You then go to a teller to get your money. They have one at their Coolidge Corner branch, and probably others as well (they have branches in Medford if you don't want to go south of the river.)

It does charge a fee but its less than the Coinstar fee (I think its 5% instead of 7%.)

[pushupstairs.livejournal.com]

I don't see why it matters if they're pleased or not, since you're giving them legal US currency.

[diatomacearth.livejournal.com]

They might have been annoyed because it's unusual or difficult for them to handle? I don't really know; I've never worked in a bank.

I'm not trying to imply that it's in any way wrong to take a sack of coin currency into a bank, or that the employees were right to be reluctant to handle it, but it's not unheard of for people to be displeased when something inconveniences them, even if they work service professions where they are professionally obliged to pretend that the only thing in the world that matters to them is strewing a client's path with flower petals.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

If you use citizens bank, the one at 141 Portland St in Cambridge is where Cambridge brings it's haul from the parking meters. Since this is about a dozen or two large steel boxes of unwrapped quarters per day, I would assume that this branch has some way of efficiently dealing with unwrapped change.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Wow, only a 20 pound sack wrapped coins and they were objecting? Hmm, I have about 60 pounds of change that I need to wrap, should be interesting taking it into a bank. Wrapping won't be too painful, it's sorted and I have a kitchen scale that's precise enough to count the change. Though pennies are a problem because pre-1982 pennies weigh about 25% more than current ones. I might just take those to the coin star.

[ravenword.livejournal.com]

I counted each one of those pennies by hand, so I feel that I did not do the bank a great inconvenience by asking them to count the rolls of pennies. I kind of enjoy the mindless tedium of coin-counting, in small doses. But yeah, sometimes even people in the service industry develop a crack in their cheery professional facade. (I consider it a fair balance of annoyances -- they were annoyed about counting change, I was annoyed about having to visit the same local branch of the bank multiple times before they'd let me in to deposit the money, because the hours of operation posted on their website did not match the real hours.)

[teko.livejournal.com]

My old bank in Columbus OH refused to take rolled coins. If you brought them in, they'd unroll them and dump all the coins in a hopper for a counting machine they kept behind the desk. They actually preferred it if you brought a big coin jar and let them deal with it.

[lissie930.livejournal.com]

Citizens makes you put your account number on the wrapper!

[ron_newman]

Hey, I'm from Columbus too! Were you a Huntington Bank customer? (Though I recall that bank actually giving me rolls to fill with coins, when I had a Dispatch paper route.)

[antimony.livejournal.com]

Alternatively, if you know a small child with a coin collection that's fairly full, take the coins to them and let them keep only the ones they need for their collection, if they roll the rest. Assuming the kid's collection is fairly good, this is cheap. :)

[ron_newman]

At this point, we've got enough interesting responses that the post should not be deleted (neither by you nor by me or other mods).

[ron_newman]

I didn't know that! Did the metal composition of the penny change?

[diatomacearth.livejournal.com]

I used to work a cash register, and every now and again, someone would come up and pay with rolled coin. We generally did not break open the rolls to count the coins, reasoning that very few people would go to that much trouble to cheat us in such a memorable way for such an inconsequential amount of money, and even the bank sent us rolls that were off from time to time. American coinage is worth so little that it's not really worth an institution's time to pay attention to it, I suppose.

[diatomacearth.livejournal.com]

Wacky. I guess it makes sense if they have their own machine to count the coins; I can't imagine going out of their way to take on a large amount of labor to verify the worth of the exchange or deposit, not unless you had a hell of a lot of quarters and half-dollars.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

What is it with all the people from Columbus around here. On more than one occasion I've been walking around davis and ran into someone I knew from columbus. But then I hung out with the same type of community of people as would hang out in davis so it does make some sense. Similarly the last time I went back to columbus, and was hanging out with friends and foafs I found out that one of the people I was hanging out with had moved from columbus and was now living a couple of blocks from me in Cambridge.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

When I was in Columbus, Huntington reps always gave impressively good service. Then when I got to know a couple of people who had worked there I heard from them how draconian Huntington was to their reps towards giving good service. I'm kinda torn. On one hand I really like having service industries give good service and am willing to pay for it, but keeping the csr's in constant fear of their job doesn't sound like a good way of going about it.

[teko.livejournal.com]

Well, to be specific, I'm from Gahanna (town motto: "It rhymes with banana")... and yes, I was a Huntington bank customer for awhile!

The bank I'm thinking of no longer exists; it was at the corner of Granville and Hamilton across from the Gahanna High School. I forget what sort of bank it was. They were kind of terrible: I left the bank when they somehow made my ATM card withdraw money from my sisters' account, and then chided me for not realizing it sooner.

Anyway, good (and surreal) to see so many Columbus folk here. We can drop obscure references to COSI and German Village and Fritz the Nite Owl!

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, originally (well 1909 - 1982 but possibly before that too, don't know about the indian pennies of the same size) it was mostly copper and now it's mostly zinc. Take some sandpaper or a knife to a penny and you can remove the very thin copper coating from one and see the silvery zinc underneath. Older pennies are the same consistency all the way through.
http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/?action=coin_specifications gives specs for the currently minted coins intended for circulation (there have been dozens of special issue coins that have been made of gold or silver since 1965 when the mint stopped using silver in the dime/quarter/half dollar/dollar coins).
http://www.coinflation.com/coins/basemetal_coin_calculator.html has the amount of metal and the value of the raw metals for current coins plus all of the coins minted since 1965. The copper in a pre 1982 penny is now worth about 2.5 cents. The zinc in a modern penny is worth about .7 cents. Interestingly nickels are now being produced at a loss because the value of the nickel that goes into a single nickel is currently worth about 7 cents.

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, I worked as a waitress. Every week I would bring in a shoebox of unwrapped coins to the bank. They would dump the coins in their coin counting machine, and credit my account or give me the cash. It was never a problem. Everyone did it. I don't see why a bank would get upset at counting the money you give them. Isn't that their job? If a bank didn't want to take my money, I think I'd find a new bank.

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

Actually, I just contacted my bank, which is a very small bank, and they told me they do not have a coin counting machine, that coins need to be wrapped. So maybe times have changed.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

yeah, i'm replying to a week-old question, but i just found the cheap and free coin counting machines (http://www.theunderstory.com/index.htm) web page.

here's their list for massachusetts: http://www.theunderstory.com/massachusetts.htm

[ron_newman]

Updated September 30, 2002, so may not be especially accurate anymore.

[racheloxuke.livejournal.com]

Now all I have to do is put all my junk away again, and put all the posters and such back on the walls.

[fionaxuryg.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Clintonville just north of campus and knew every crack in the sidewalks leading to Noseworthy's (punk clothes store on 11th n' high) to Peggy's old Atlantis shop at 5th and high and all the way back north to the Columbus Agora (now The Newport) where I saw my first show with The Psychedelic Furs in .

[summerybura.livejournal.com]

-- Ed Edgar , January I was about to write this comment when I read a posting of Ed Edgar, January that essentially sais what I was going to say.

[brandeefupoh.livejournal.com]

See also: Chase Freedom Plus - received first statement Chase Freedom Plus - 3% cash back in 6 categories Comparing Chase cards (replying a comment) Merchant categories on Chase Freedom statement Chase Freedom Visa card signup bonus 17 Responses to “Chase Freedom Plus - received third statement” Feed for this Entry Trackback Address 1 Patrick May 8th, at pm Did you convert your existing Freedom card to Plus or did you open a new card.

[akmuller.livejournal.com]

Just called Brookline Savings and you have to deposit it in an account (and then after 3-4 days can obviously w/draw it)

TIP: free coin machine in Dartmouth, MA--at Bristol County Savings--it's a smallish machine the woman told me on the phone and only takes a few coffee cans of coins at a time.