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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

> Folks can take them to a bank

FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.

One of the reasons why I changed banks. My new bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby, you throw your coins in, it consumes them, and gives you a slip that you take to the teller.

As I understand it, coins are considered a government service. Banks and retailers pay to deal with them. Buying them from the public for face value actually saves them money.

It's so easy to use coins, pennies included, in day-to-day transactions I never accumulate any. Accumulating pennies or other coins is a concept I don't understand. You can spend up to 4 pennies in any purchase you do, and if you don't can't never receive more than 4. For nickels, dimes, and quarters, the maximum is smaller.

If a person has good basic arithmetic skills and it is a priority for them, then yes they can use coins easily. However, a lot of people either can't do the math or are unwilling to use change correctly.

For myself, it's such a priority that I'll get upset with myself if I have more than 4 pennies.

Japan has more coins (in regular use) than USA, so giving the correct amount is even more important or you'll end up carrying a lot of coins. 1000 yen is the smallest bill so... Example: 999 yen. 500,4x100,50,4x10,5,4x1 yen coins, 19 coins total.

When I used to use cash I used to do this all the time. I would nearly always overpay to minimise the number of coins in my pocket. For example I had a bill of £1.63 and I was paying with two £1 coins, I would get 37 pence in change, which would be a minimum of four coins (20p, 10p, 5p, 2p). So I would pay £2.13 to get a 50p or £2.03 to get two 20p coins.

95% of the time the person serving me would clock on to what I was doing but the other 6% it'd take some persuasion, and occasionally they would insist on giving me back my overpayment before ringing it up.

Most of our supermarkets have at least one self service machine that accepts change. Once a week I pour any loose change in then settle the rest with a card.

I guess this might depend where you are.

When I lived in Scotland there was a "loose change" machine at the local Tesco. You pour in your coins and it would give you a receipt you could take to a cashier to get cash back - but the downside was that it charged you something like 10% of the total as a fee. Which I wouldn't pay.

Edit: I just searched and the Tesco documentation says "There is a 25p transaction fee and an 11.5% processing fee on the total amount of coins you put in the Coinstar centre. For charity donations, this processing fee is reduced to 8.9%." (wow, how generous!)

I meant self service machines where you pay for your shopping. There are usually one or two that accept change.

Ahh, somehow I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification!

Same here in the US.

Back in the day, I'd sift through my jar of change and keep the quarters, which were good for parking meters and laundry. The rest went into the Coinstar machine. The fee for counting dimes, nickles, and pennies seemed OK.

The machine always had some weird foreign coins or subway tokens left over by the previous customer in the reject bin, which was potentially interesting.

FWIW in the US many of those machines offer to skip the fee if you take the money in the form of a gift card for Amazon or Walmart or similar.

That actually never occurred to me, I assumed they only took bills. Welp, problem solved and I'm no longer out of milk.

Obligatory Dr. Strangelove reference:

*You don't think I'd go into combat with loose change in my pocket, do you?"

But I must admit that I never formed the habit of bringing change with me when I go somewhere. So it piled up at home. The quarters were easy: They got saved for parking, laundry, etc. But I ended up with a sack of pennies that I finally cashed in at the bank.

It's odd how banks have largely stopped operating change counting machines.

In my childhood we'd hoard loose change then make a trip to the local po-dunk bank serving my neighborhood surrounded by corn fields, and even there they'd take our bucket of loose change and dump it into a counting machine for free.

It was a game to try guess the amount we'd get in paper cash...

Now you have to pay for this service at a grocery store using a cumbersome machine operated by Coinstar.

COVID happened. However, all three of the banks I visit regularly (over branch of a national bank, two branches of a local credit union) all have coin counting machines in the lobby, though it took awhile for them to be added back to the branches that took theirs out.

No doubt COVID kicked skimpflation into high gear, but this was already a pattern I noticed long before 2019.

It seemed to generally coincide with the demise of retail in general, and of course the elimination of bank-teller interactions and emergence of ATM machines. All of these things are a blurry mess from my past...

Fun fact: modern dimes, quarters, and half-dollars all have the same value by weight -- about $20 per pound.

This is true by design (silver coins had a weight chosen by value of silver), not coincidence. Also while nickels and pennies don’t match.

A lot of banks just have one of those coin counting machine things (like Coinstar but not Coinstar).

Coinstar also often has zero commission options like gift cards that are an easy way to cash in extra change without paying fees.

Average gift card has a discount of 8 to 20% built in. Looks like Coinstar is currently charging 12.9%, so a gift card could actually be more profitable for them.

If you're feeding it pennies you can also just give it one penny at a time to avoid the fees.

A credit union local to me waives the fee if you are a member.

Mine had the machines, then ripped them out, over the cost to them the regional bank they deal with imposed and other excuses. Coinstar (some) gift card is the only no-fee I've found in my area, but then you're stuck with a gift card instead of cash.

I have talked to my bank and was told not to roll them, they just throw them in a machine to count them and deposit the money in my count. It is not uncommon to see people bring in a box of coins and the bank takes care of them.

> FWIW my bank refuses to accept unrolled coins, long before this month's retirement of the penny.

My (edit: old) bank refused to accept unrolled coins back in the early 2000s.

So roll them?

I have like 2 dollars in coins, not even a roll of pennies. I just thought I'd try depositing it while running a different bank errand and they were like "naw, go to coinstar with your poor person money"

Coin counting machines exist for decades (and I hope still produced), why not all banks have them?

In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).

My bank used to have one, but it merged with another bank and the machine got taken away "to serve a larger branch"

Is that legal?

It seems more reasonable than the outright refusal of many businesses to accept cash at all, and plus this transaction isn't even a "debt" to which the penny would be legal tender.

As I understand it, more than X dollars worth of coins is not legal tender. I learned this due to an absurd case in Detroit, where someone stole bags of coins from an armored car, got caught, and claimed their crime was not a felony because it was below the dollar limit for a felony. Of course the judge treated their request with the disdain that it deserved.

There are multiple laws that could have been broken to make it a felony, but if the only reason it would have been a felony was the dollar amount, I'm actually less inclined to side with the judge.

This is all third-hand, through a game of internet-telephone, and my money (if you'll pardon the pun) is on there being additional factors though

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