Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Coin washer keeps Westin St. Francis' change shiny (2010)

sfgate.com

131 pointserehweb114 comments

I visited this hotel last year and asked around after the cleaned coins. The first few staff members I asked had no idea what I was talking about - but they found me a more tenured member of staff and he told me that they don't do this any more. Which is sad, because I wanted some shiny pennies!

He probably retired and that was the end of it. A law firm near where I worked had an elderly lady who worked as an elevator operator up until a couple of years ago. Once she retired, the elevator was set to modern operation. They could have switched over long ago but kept her as the elevator operator, likely because she had been there so long and in the big scheme of things it didn't cost much. Might have been the same with the Westin St. Francis who long ago no longer really needed a coin cleaner but he was part of their connection to their past and didn't cost very much to keep around. Once he was gone though, there was little reason to get a replacement.

Season 7 of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel showed this in action (I still enjoy reruns of Dirty Jobs)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dirty_Jobs_episodes#...

I love Dirty Jobs. I don't understand the criticisms of the show.

What criticisms?

Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs, got involved with some weird online university that promotes a lot of conspiratorial crap / climate change denial / things like that, and used his fame to promote that stuff. You can imagine some people aren't happy about it.

But I definitely loved the series.

Here's some video - not sure if it's that episode or something different.

https://youtu.be/9IqHCVRbidA

ha! Video title is

MONEY LAUNDERING AT THE WESTIN ST. FRANCIS

That video isn't the Dirty Jobs video but it does show the same room and process (just without all of the Dirty Jobs humorous commentary)

He might be one of the only professional money-washers left at a private business, but some of the people who rank very highly on the currency tracking site www.wheresgeorge.com are known to wash, dry, and iron hundreds to thousands of paper banknotes every day. Wattsburg Gary, one of the sites top ranked users attributes his high "hit rate" to this practice which is about as straightforward as it sounds. He runs the money through a regular washer and dryer, then irons it, puts his wheresgeorge stamp on it, then sends it on its way.

Sounds like money laundering but I guess it’s legal in his case.

Defacing US currency isn't legal.

Modification isn't "defacement", though.

Modification that doesn't alter the denomination or attempt to decieve is legal. A crucial difference.

I'd argue cleaning notes and coins isn't even "modification" it's just that, cleaning

Modification would be writing with a ball-point pen on it.

My wife recently got me a colored & decorated $2 bill. It's decorated with Chinese graphics to celebrate the year of the tiger.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91hUwSD3ImL...

I was very surprised to learn that this is not only legal, but apparently is still considered legal tender. They're produced by a company called "The Merrick Mint" - which is not actually a mint, just a company with "mint" in the name. They specialize in taking real U.S. currently and decorating/coloring it.

https://www.merrickmint.com/

While wheresgeorge hasn't been entirely "cleared," they have been directly investigated by the secret service and the only fallout was that they were prohibited from selling stamps directly. It is not permitted to advertise on currency, and they considered this to be promoting the practice.

Individuals marking their own bills for the purpose of tracking them however was considered a separate and fully permissible action. The legal standard for defacing or destroying requires that the banknote be made unfit for circulation -- though that is about as clear as mud, it has been a pretty tall standard to meet.

I guess you could say this hotel's definitely laundering money :)

This reminds of Book Off, Japan's biggest used book store. They use special machines to slightly shave off edges of books[0], so that the books appear newer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off#Operations

That trick with the edges is a pretty good value add, since a lot of people don't really care about the actual age or history of the book, they just want their bookshelves to appear neat.

Theoretically I think it could actually extend the life of books, assuming a clean fresh edge is less likely to propagate tears than a rough battered edge which might have stress-concentrating nicks. Then again, pages tearing doesn't really seem like a particularly common failure mode for books.

What you're saying applies to materials under stress, not paper

Right, tears usually happen when you're turning a page.

How does a chain of second hand bookshops succeed in this day and age? Is it because manga are more like magazines in size and regularity of purchase than novels? I'd love it if there was something like that in my country.

They seem to be doing very well - they have huge multi floor stores in big cities and smaller more modest stores about everywhere else - we even saw one at the edge of pretty rural Izumo during a bus ride!

In general I think there are three main reasons for their success: 1) Price - older books are dirt cheap in Book Off. You can get artbooks, drawing books, manga, fiction, non fictin, even games, cds, dvds for often fifth of the price or even elss. A manga volume that sold for 600 yen will be there for 100 yen for example. Also, you could get even really rare books sometimes, that would cost much more than even their original price on ebay and other auction sites.

2) Japanese still use a lot of physical media. You will still encounter shops full of DVDs, bluerays, music CDs, console and game software on physical media. You don't really see that very often in the west anymore. So that likely translates to books. I am not really sure about the reasons for this - could be an interesting study. :)

3) Like for many things, there is a complete lifecycle for books in Japan. You can buy a new buy while knowing that when you finish reading it you can sell it to Book Off or similar used book chain, tobrecover part of the cost. Then you can buy a new book, rinse and repeat. Could be even related to japanese flats being in general pretty small, so people in Japan might be more inclined to sell books once they are done with them to save space.

This book lifecycle is something I'm really missing here in Europe. You buy a book, read it to the end and then what? There are small "old book" shops, but they mostly have pretty expensive rare old books and seems to be pretty snobbish about what they accept. No way they would accept your one year old SF book you just finished reading, so that someone else can enjoy it while you buy a new one for effectively less.

AFAIK people work around this by selling books via social networks, but this really doesn't come close. Nothing beats comming to Book Off, unloading a bunch of read books for some money and then just browsing for all the gems hidden on the endless shelves. I've ligerarly bought many tens of killograms of books from Book Off. Thannfully, the airline (Alitalia) allows 2 x 23 kg luggage per person, otherwise I would have been rather screwed. :D

If Alitalia means thay you also live in Italy, maybe Libraccio? I don't know how selling to them works, but I often get (random) hard-to-find books at a decent price there.

Actually not, in another european country. They just have been always the most cost effective. :)

Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dimes. It is a huge waste of human time to count these small denominations out. They should round up to the nearest $0.25

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01

Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.

Rounding up is dumb, but that is t really an argument.

There are standard rounding rules (applies to the total, not the line item) that result in rounding up and down with equal frequency.

Well, pretty much equal frequency.

I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08.

But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

This makes 0 sense. Firstly, if you're rounding to the nearest 5c, you can round up both $x.x3 and $x.x8, and get fair rounding. Perhaps you are thinking of the slightly more complicated deal with rounding to the nearest 10c, where you round down $x.05 and up $x.15.

And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.

You are correct about the unusual rounding to the nearest 10 cents.

But Benford's law extends to less significant digits, just decreasingly so. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization... That's why the link says "leading digits", not "most significant digit".

Always rounding up seems unlikely, in particular for price sensitive goods.

Retail net margins are often in single digits overall and net negative on competitive staples. There may not be room in cash flow to round down.

edit: okay, downvoters, what did i get wrong factually? I'm just basing this statement on dozens of general, food, and discount retail 10-K filings and analysis over longer than a decade of following them.

The USA currently rounds to nearest cent and it works well. I could buy 1.49 cents worth of something and have it rounded to 1 cent.

If the rounding becomes 5cents rather than 1cent it doesn't change a lot.

I'm reminded of a comedy skit from childhood based on Australia removing 1 and 2 cent pieces. A guy buys 2 cents of petrol at a time repeatedly pushing his car from pump to pump at a service station. It went on for a while and eventually the owner at the counter, who was down a whole 10 cents at this point, just shook his head and laughed while exclaiming "Dickhead!".

If you’re comfortable with not being precise to half pennies or $0.001, then there is likely a unit that you feel is equitable to round to, and the question is what unit that should be. As rounding will favor you as often as it works against you (assuming it’s not heavily gamed), there should be a unit that people trait as fair. As that choice has remained the same regardless of inflation, it might be fair to say we only use $0.01 because it’s what it used to be, not because it’s the right choice. I would argue that $0.05 or $0.10 would be better choices than pennies, for instance.

Worth pointing out that while $0.001 (mil) coins never existed, half-cent coins were minted from 1792 to 1857.

Even in 1857 $0.005 was worth way way more than even a quarter is today. Probably more than a dollar. (Actual inflation gets a bit hard to track going back that far).

If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you.

True, but $0.001 (mil) tokens do exist. They were usually used for sales tax accounting, IIRC.

If you visit the grocery store twice a week, then with 24 cents rounded up each trip (worst case, not average case), you pay about $25 a year more for groceries. Meanwhile, if you round up to the penny, then the worst case is .9 cents twice a week, which is about a dollar a year.

All this pales in comparison to the 1%+ markup due to people using credit cards and charging the same price for credit cards as cash, though.

$0.10 is a tricky choice (in the US) because it's not compatible with the next denomination up ($0.25). If anything like this ever happens, we could round either to the nearest $0.05 or the nearest $0.25, but not easily in-between.

How many of your purchases are $1? You only have such a dramatic percent when the purchase price is very low.

On a more typical $10 purchase it wouldn't have much effect.

Several countries don't have a 0.01 coin, so they have rounding when making a cash payment.

Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr.

When paying by card, the exact amount is paid.

For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢.

Someone so poor that 10¢ matters can game the system with careful purchases. The shop won't care, since handling the 1¢ coins is just a hassle for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

When I was a kid, I remember going to a small hobby store to buy a couple of bottles of paint. The bottles were $0.25 each, and I had exactly $0.50. I took my bottles to the register and was told the total was $0.51, because of sales tax. So I only purchased one bottle, and the total was $0.25. As I was leaving I realized that the tax had been wiped out, so I went back in and purchased the second bottle for $0.25 too.

These days it's common to find pennies on the ground because they aren't worth the effort to bend over to pick them up. I pick them up anyway, because I still remember a time when they mattered.

I used to buy my candies one at a time as a child to avoid sales tax. Annoyed the hell out of the cashier. Thanks for reminding me :)

I'm envious of the <2% sales tax rate.

I may be misremembering the exact amounts, it was a very long time ago - closer to 4% than 2%. I believe the tax rate today is at least double what it was back then.

Personally I think we should just have 1 decimal digit, instead of two.

Yes, that means new coins, but the coins the way they are are less and less useful every year. At some point we'll have to make a change.

Dimes exist?

Still too granular IMO. If a penny is worth 1/31th of what it used to be, we should drop it and go to quarters.

And half dollars exist as well, so we might not actually need to issue anything new.

Just slowly collect all the old coins, until only some collectors have it.

The quarter idea isn't as good because you are still doing math to 2 digits (for example sales tax would have to be calculated, then some kind of rounding). Switching to a single digit is simpler.

The number of digits used to write it out doesn't need to be thought of as an indicator of simplicity once you realize that you're rounding for a purpose unrelated to reducing the number of digits written after the decimal point (which is a typical reason to round, but is not the reason here). Just think of dividing a dollar 10 ways versus dividing it 4 ways.

With more and more things going digital everywhere, this argument gets less and less important over time

Better would be to revalue the currency by dividing by ten or twenty. Change would mean something again, and have some useful value.

Yes it totally doesn't make sense. The coins are worth so little now. Also making pennies adds $2m a year to our trade deficit with China.

Huh? Are pennies sourced from China?

No, they're made here as far as I know - but I strongly suspect the copper and zinc is mined in China.

As the other commentor noted, most of the zinc for pennies comes from China (I'm not sure about the copper).

Sweden has kept up by continually getting rid of their smallest change. The last to be discontinued was the 50 "öre" coin in 2010, leaving the smallest Swedish coin valued at 10 US cents.

The last time the US deprecated a coin denomination was the half cent in 1857. Due to inflation!

As a rare coin collector, washed pieces are worth far, far, less.. cleaning coins makes them shiny but also wears off important details.

I can't help but be slightly mortified by the mass-cleaning of coins..

>Along with the coins, the burnisher is filled with water, bird shot to knock the dirt off, and a healthy pour of 20 Mule Team Borax soap. After three hours of swishing the coins around, Holsen uses a metal ice scoop to pour the loot into a perforated roast pan that sifts out the bird shot.

Argh, the horror!! I really hope no rare coins have passed through this.

Ah, but that makes your already collected coins more valuable

Lol, there's always a silver lining. :)

Only true before 1965, at which point linings were switched to be copper-nickel alloys.

Why not just use a mild acid instead of an abrasive? I remember being delighted as a kid that ketchup made pennies shiny!

Borax isnt terribly abrasive though

The bird shot is.

The bird shot is another matter

Not sure who's downvoting you, but I came here to say exactly this, and you're exactly right!

All my numismatic spidey sense twitched when I read the story. I remember one of the first things I learned was that counter to instincts, cleaning coins with manual abrasives is bad bad bad.

What about ultrasonic washing? The machines sold for cleaning jewellery? Are they okay?

Cleaning coins that have potential numismatic value is always a no-no, especially if it is something you intend to have graded.

Even stuff that doesn't have a numismatic value, just common 'junk silver' (non key date coinage with silver content) is generally received poorly. (I'm a mod of /r/silverbugs). Disrupting/reomivng natural patina, surface damage (even microabrasion), artificial toning/patina is almost universally undesirable.

Grading services, like PCGS, will even state a coin has been cleaned. PCGS's page on 'no grade' coins on cleaning https://www.pcgs.com/news/no-grade-coins-pt4 :

"This is a tough category and the subject of much debate and discussion over the years. PCGS interprets cleaning as surface damage due to any form of abrasive cleaning. "Cleaned" covers a wide range or appearances, from a grossly polished coin to one where faint hairlines can be seen only at a particular angle or in only one area on an otherwise perfectly normal coin. This is perhaps the most frustrating of all the No Grades, because subtle cleaning is often difficult to detect in less-than-optimal grading conditions. "Dipping" (the removal of toning with a chemical bath) is not considered cleaning under this definition, unless it has been done repeatedly or improperly. In the past, many coins were cleaned by well-meaning numismatists, before the dangers were fully understood."

Cleaning with non-abrasives could also lead to artificial toning, covered at the same link above in their 'questionable color' section:

"Most experienced numismatists appreciate the beauty of a spectacularly toned coin. Because toning is a natural chemical reaction, there are ways of accelerating the process as well as "enhancing" the results. These artificial means of creating toning are largely frowned upon, and if PCGS encounters a coin which we believe has been helped along in the natural toning process, we will not assign a numerical grade. A questionable color call can also occur if one tries to recolor a copper coin back to its original "red" color. Toning is also added in an effort to mask a past cleaning. Whatever the reason, collectors like their coins naturally toned over many years."

There used to be a scam known as "sweating" where the scammer would take a bunch of gold or silver coins, put them in a bag, and shake the crap out of it for a while. Small particles of precious metal would wear off and accumulate in the bottom of the bag, which could then be recovered and sold as bullion. Afterward the (now somewhat-worn) coins could still be spent at their original face value.

This was hard to detect compared to other common scams of the time(such as clipping or filing the edges of the coin) because the wear pattern was pretty close to what you'd expect from normal wear and tear.

I shudder reading that, as a fellow collector.

Maybe this is the perfect job for a coin collector. Lets assume this coin washer already knows this and is allowed to sift through every coin that comes through a fancy hotel before washing all the plebeian coins.

The article says that after washing he goes through them to remove foreign coins and other non-standard currency.

> As a rare coin collector, washed pieces are worth far, far, less.. cleaning coins makes them shiny but also wears off important details.

But the hotel isn't going to devote the kind of effort that would be necessary to realize any collectable value of the coins, whereas shining the coins they handle is literally (if only very slightly) burnishing their image.

This reminds me of video game collectors complaining when games get played as the cartridges get scratched. I think collectors need to accept the reality of what they collect. Games are meant to be played, and coins generally need to be cleaned.

Don't think they were ever cleaned as vigorously as the article describes, but it's not so long since banks used to clean and roll coins. Now they mainly use plastic bags.

Not even sure if new coins fresh from the mint are still rolled, I can't remember seeing a roll for ages.

How many pay with cash at a hotel?

I'd expect it to be very low — large bills, often paid for by a company credit card or in advance online.

For the hotel bill itself, I agree that most people will pay via credit card, but I've seen plenty of people paying cash for incidentals at the front desk (snacks, drinks, etc) as well as at the hotel restaurant/bar.

There are plenty of times people who are traveling do not want a digital record of their payments for things such as alcohol or "food for two"

Why would anyone want a digital record of any of their payments? By default?

EDIT: I should have clarified that I was thinking of a digital record in someone else’s possession. Having a record of your own transactions yourself could certainly be useful.

One reason is to load it into their employers expense system for reimbursement... My company credit card expenses automatically show up in our expense system for easier expense reporting.

Another reason is so I can audit the charges -- if my credit card had an option for "Don't track individual purchases", I wouldn't use it since I want to look at the charges at the end of the month and make sure they were mine.

Going even farther, I'd love it if full receipts passed through the credit card system. Yes, my credit card company would mine the data, but replacing "$20 at FOOCORP on 11/23" with "$20 at FOOCORP on 11/23 <click for receipt>" would be well worth it to me.

(I wrote up something advocating this in https://www.jefftk.com/p/attach-receipts-to-credit-card-tran...)

There's a startup or two doing that in the UK (can't recall the names), but if course it only works for shops that are on board and use a till system that supports it.

The functionality exists, and many receipts already do get uploaded into the credit card network. It’s called “Level 3” transaction data.

This is especially true for air travel, where ticket details are almost always attached to the charge. However, I’ve started seeing it done at some large online merchants as well (e.g. Amazon). It’s typically used for expense tracking on corporate p-cards.

It’s rare to see the additional details displayed for consumer accounts, but the data is there on the backend.

I'm onboard. The amount of time I have to mess with receipts is a pain, all for reimbursement. And on the other side are receipts I never had any use for, which get tossed in the trash immediately.

Johnny555 makes some good points, but I think the focus here is on the case where someone ordinarily ambivalent about digital purchase records specifically seeks to avoid creating one for a questionable purchase.

- Reimbursements

- Budgeting

- Mileage points and other rewards

- Being able to dispute transactions

Overall though, few people explicitly want a digital record of all their payments. They are just willing to accept it because of the convenience that credit cards bring.

I think the point is that, in hotels, there are sometimes situations where they specifically want to got out of their way to avoid having records.

I don't know about hotel but the escort industry thrives on motels where I imagine all of them pay cash for their rooms.

I imagine even higher end escorts, that are far more exclusive (many of which have websites with paid photo shoot photos and online booking for known clients) and do incall in more upscale locations, use cash for rooms simply due to the amounts of cash they're seeing.

There's at least one subreddit for this industry, intended for owrkers only, and I'll peruse it occasionally, but I've never seen any of the higher end ones mention how they handle rooms. I suspect many have the client get the room, but i can also see the client paying cash for the room as well.

----

Unrelated to escorts, the few times I've used motels/hotels I've paid cash simply because they haven't had a terminal on the desk and I'm not keen on handing my card over to someone behind a desk that you generally can't see over without leaning over it. My paranoia screams "great way for them to skim the card directly or take photo/video of it". Similarly the few times I've rented a car I've let them use my card for the hold but have paid cash.

---

Unrelated to cash:

Hotels go to all sorts of means to build brands (like they are doing here with the 'clean coins'). Some chains will even go as far as making their locations all smell the same. I remember a podcast episode years ago that did a deep dive into hotel scent and appearance but for the life of me can't remember what podcast it was, perhaps Planet Money. Here's an article on scent branding though https://hbr.org/2018/04/inside-the-invisible-but-influential...

It wouldn't surprise me if a hotel even dealing with relatively small amounts of coinage in a given week would even go as far as hand-sorting rolls from a money service to select new coins as part of their brand. Chains do all sorts of psychological tricks to give you a familiar experience at their various locations in hopes of getting you to use their service over a competitor.

Even if you're paying cash for a room, how much of that are you paying in coins?

You've never taken a mistress?

When I'm travelling overseas, I'll often use the hotel bill as a way to cash out my remaining local currency. I still get a receipt, just two lines under paid/reconciliation, one for cash and one for anything remaining on a card.

Your hotel bill is often the last large bill before you leave the country.

Same goes for splitting off the incidentals. It's not anything nefarious, I just would rather not have my food/drink on my corporate card. For one, it makes for cleaner accounting back at the office, which is always nice when doing lots of expense reports.

Couldn't they just get new coins (which would be shiny) from the mint? Would that be more expensive than washing them?

I would imagine a lot more time consuming. Driving to the bank and waiting in line takes time

They're currently spending 10 hours per week on this. I can't imagine that 2-3 trips per week would take longer than that.

It's only what, 4 blocks?

I think (don't quote me on this) that you have to pay extra (on top of the value of the coins) to get them 'fresh', because handling, packaging, etc.

Along with the coins, the burnisher is filled with water, bird shot to knock the dirt off, and a healthy pour of 20 Mule Team Borax soap

Isn't bird shot typically made from lead? Are they coating the coins with lead?

It can also be steel, which is apt to work better in this context. Lead shot might actually mark up the coins.

In California, lead shot was a contributor to the near extinction of the California Condor so it’s effectively banned for hunting purposes. You can basically just find steel now.

https://www.kqed.org/science/1944241/lead-ammunition-is-now-...

It may be banned in certain areas but lead shot is still sold:

https://www.cabelas.com/category/104567580.uts?CQ_view=list&...

https://www.amazon.com/Magnum-Lead-Shot-2-25-Pound/dp/B001QV...

And some bans have been reversed:

New U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on Thursday issued an order overturning an Obama administration ban on the controversial use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle used on federal lands and waters

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-zinke/new-in...

But even if there were a ban, since this hotel has been doing this since the 1930's, they could still have a few hundred pound bags of real lead shot in the basement that they're using for this.

Lead is still used for dove and clay shooting. I think in most places the steel restrictions only applies to waterfowl (may even be federal).

The point is to keep lead out of the carcasses many other animals eat as direct ingestion would cause the second most harm (first being to have it delivered straight from the barrel). Lead shot that falls to the ground when clay shooting is potentially dangerous but far less than when ingested.

I'm guessing most ammo being used isn't for hunting, it's for target shooting. Lead ammo is still legal for that (and ranges can make some decent money by sifting through their berms and recycling the lead).

Kind of a moot point, but I don't think Cabela's has any locations in California, and they stopped shipping here after Prop 63

> but I don't think Cabela's has any locations in California

No, but Bass Pro Shop is all over, and bought Cabela's a few years back.

They're probably using "bird shot" colloquially to describe what's really just a steel abrasive consisting of small metal balls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_abrasives

"Bird shot" is the size of the steal abrasive. Ridiculous to think they open up shotgun shells and pour in the projectiles.

You can buy it by the barrel. Good chance they did use real shot at some point.

I actually doubt that. Lead is a shitty abrasive.

Awful popup videos and ads. Atrocious loading time. Dr;

They are probably damaging rare/valuable coins by washing them... this is a pretty ridiculous idea anyways...

Doesn't seem like a super profitable thing to do. The washer estimated that he washed 1.5 million in change over 20 years. Paying someone 3 days a week over 20 years is a pretty significantly portion of that, although it doesn't say how many hours a day they are paid for.

1.5 million in change means more than (since you give out less than $1 in change) 1.5 million interactions at the hotel are that much nicer.

They also paid a lot for the nice interior at the hotel. It's about luxury

Reply on news.ycombinator.com