A laundry mat by my house has one. It's been broke for years. It has 3 different options. Exchange 2 nickels for a dime. A quarter for 2 dimes and a nickel or 2 quarters for a half.
I think I very, very vaguely remember something like that when I was a small child. Can you snap a picture next time you're there?
Maybe the Laundromat would do better business if they updated their coin exchange machine! This exchange machine you have mentioned sounds interesting. Can you take a picture of it? Sounds antique. Maybe at one time the washing machines only took a certain size coin and if you wanted you could exchange your non-fitting coins for the proper sized coin.
Ah, coin exchangers, the counterfeiters' dream... I live in a big apartment complex, and I put a sign up in the laundry saying I would exchange US coins for Canadian coins, which don't work in the machines, hoping I would get a silver or two, but "none" yet, in two years. I'm 50 feet from the laundry, so it's convenient.
This is going off on a tangent, but in the late 90's my parents used to go on vacation to the Dominican Republic pretty often. They used to bring back rolls of Dominican 25 centavos coins, which were like a dollar per roll in exchange. They worked in parking meters in the US up until they switched them with the digital versions. Good deal
