My CRH'ing days are over :-(

Wait a minute! Foggy Bottom is below M Street off the Whitehurst Freeway. Which reminds me! Is the Little Tavern still there at the end of M Street? Yum!

Chris

 

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Lol I had to laugh at this. I was trying to find a photo of it but I have experienced that. I worked and one of the last two full service gas stations in Lancaster County, Pa when I was in Highschool. It was the Amaco (owned by Sico Serve out of Mount Joy) on Manor Ave in Millersville, PA. Now it is two cousins pizza. We had to wash windows, check oil, put it in if they bought it, pump the gas AND we were the cash register.

 

I never said I knew of a specific bank that refuses to deal with coin so I have no obligation to name one for you. I am responding to what others are claiming (both on this forum as well as others) about banks becoming more difficult about dealing with coin and some going as far as to charge a certain fee PER ROLL. It's a simple fact that banks pay less interest than they used to, charge more fees, and provide less services while at the same time executives make profits far above anything they ever did, not even taking into account inflation. And that's fine, that's how capitalism works. Where I don't agree with Chris is his implication that it is unreasonable for a customer of a bank to expect the bank to provide "coin services" to it's customers. It's an entirely reasonable expectation in my opinion, provided it's not abused.

 

Gee whiz! That must have been sometime in the mid-90's. Those kinds of free services in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area were gone by the mid-70's. I guess it took longer for the rural areas to react.

Chris

 

I think the issue is when becomes a logistic problem for the bank. If they are having problems because individuals are depleting their supply or overloading them with excess they will be forced to change their policies.
If your bank takes issue with it, just open a business account. It's pretty cheap and they tend to charge a fee per order not per roll. You could also try to work out a deal with someone you know who owns a business to order coins for you thru their account...

(side note: there is still one full service gas station I know of in my area. It is conveniently located near some of the most expensive houses in the area... they definitely make up the difference in gas price)

 

The problem is that it IS being abused. All you have to do is read the posts we get here on a daily basis from newcomers who are searching rolls. These members range in ages from their teens to their seventies, and you can't tell me that all of them have hefty bank accounts.

Chris

 

We need to stop producing so many coins.
If you eliminate cents and halves, you can just produce 10-20M of the other denominations. (That's never going to happen). In 1000 years archaeologists will be finding US cents in the ground and throwing them away like pull tabs because they will still be worthless.
As for the CRH, the banks already pay more for a box of rolled coin then they are selling it to you at face value. The constant buying boxes and dumping 99+% of them back into the system just creates more work and expense for them. And you don't think they are going to pass that expense on to you, or eliminate that expense altogether?
When I was a kid you could WALK INTO ANY BANK and get change for a dollar, or a roll of pennies, etc. Without ID or an account. You can't even walk into most banks now and get $5 in pennies without an account. And you think this CRH isn't costing them money? It is and it's going to come to an abrupt halt.

 

Active over-the-top discussions are GOOD for everybody here. The Man says "...everything's going to be all right..." I'm not so sure. CT-er's who grew up 1990-2010 have seen the best luck and the best circumstances in the history of mankind, but it is not sustainable, for a variety of reasons, the most prominent being debt, greed, religious wars, and overpopulation.

 

I worked part time throughout high school and pulled some shifts as favors up to '00. I think they closed in '03 or so. @V. Kurt Bellman may be able to help with a date. The last one I think was in Willow Street and there was a fit when they closed.

 

To all the naysayers in this thread: I will coin roll hunt until the banks force me not to. My girlfriend and I do 4 boxes of halves each on Friday nights and it is something we look forward too all week. Do we upset the tellers that have to dump them in the coin machines? Probably. Does it cost the bank a few extra dollars to give us boxes that they order? Probably. The fact is the banks that give me boxes don't care and the banks that take my dumps just put up with it. Don't understand why this is such a big deal. If I am forced to stop then so be it. I'll take up bowling Friday nights with my girlfriend.

 

"In 1000 years archaeologists will be finding US cents in the ground and throwing them away like pull tabs because they will still be worthless"

Well I hope at least the copper ones will be worth something by then!

 

The zinc ones will have rotted away within a decade.

 

Funny. I was hearing the same thing (minus the "religious wars") part about the 1960s -- in the 1980s.

"The best of times" and "the worst of times" are likely to keep coming around for longer than any of us will be around.

 

Oh, I see... so when you said this quote:

I assumed you actually heard about an actual bank making "no coins" policies. When you said that so few banks will go that far, you implied that some banks have. Your response gave me the answer I was looking for, so we can leave that there.

Please note that charging a fee for ordering a box of coins for a customer is not, in fact, a "no coins" policy as you suggested. It's a policy that requires customers to pay for a service provided. It's becoming harder to find places to deposit coins because people cheat the system (how many times have you found rolls miscounted, with foreign coins, or trash hidden in them?) @cpm9ball Chris never said it is unreasonable to expect a bank to provide "coin services" to its customers. He said it's unreasonable for them to expect it for free, especially if the bank's policy doesn't say it will. He also wasn't referring to 1, 2 or 15 rolls, but boxes of coins. You chose a minimalist approach to attempt to argue with him, because it is much harder to say you think a bank should order a box of half dollars for you vs hand you 10 rolls of quarters. If the bank's policy is to charge for change and it bothers you, go somewhere else. Don't sit there and stomp your feet and cry foul for not being allowed to take advantage of, and even abuse, privileges that cost the bank money.

Bottom line: Getting mad because a bank charges you for the costs they incur on your (general you, not you specifically @steve63 ) behalf is rather silly. Feel free to take your money to another bank because they won't incur fees on your behalf, just don't expect the bank to change its policies for one special snowflake.

 

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, it always seems silly when people refuse to agree to disagree. You've taken a reasonable approach to this: I'll do it until they don't allow it. Others have a different mindset: I'm entitled to it, so I'm going to stomp my feet and demand service. The naysayers are saying: it's a privilege, not a right. You're actually agreeing with the supposed naysayers, so cheers to agreeing.

 

This is sort of a side issue, but you have to wonder why commerce still fools around with half dollars at all. I have not given or received one in years, surely; they won't work in vending machines; there's no place in the cash drawer for them; and there's an ample supply of quarters to take their place.

And yet around the world, coins with a foreign-exchange value of more than 50 cents are proliferating -- the British £1 coin, the €1 coin, etc., maybe it's due to inflation or the fact that a coin lasts 20 (50?) (100?) times longer than its paper counterpart?

The banks must get tired of shuffling them around when they are functionally obsolete. I am guessing there's as much resistance to half dollars as there is to SBA and Presidential $1 coins...

 

In case you didn't know, the Mint has not been releasing half dollars into general circulation since 2001. Assuming that there are half dollars from the years 2001-2016 in circulation, where do you think they came from?

And, don't tell me they came from China!

Chris

 

Well, I didn't know, because I don't pay attention to such things.

But why would I wonder where they came from? Where could they come from except (originally) from the Mint, and later perhaps from the FR banks? So the CRH-er's are searching through the same coins, over and over and over?

Now all this acrimony and hand-wringing makes even less sense.

When a branch bank orders (?) halves upon request, where do they come from? The vaults of the parent bank? Certainly not from some new source, I assume.

This whole thing reminds me of the old joke, why it's hard to raise earthworms for bait. It's difficult and time-consuming to think of names for all of them.

 

Yeah, after re-reading it looks like I am agreeing with the naysayers as I see the costs and hassle. However, I will keep going as long as I can! I'm addicted to coin roll hunting I admit it!!!!

 

And sorting out the good stuff. Which sometimes gets sold to dealers, and then on to other collectors.

But from those collectors, they're sometimes stolen, or inherited by people who don't know or care about coins. Sometimes they're sold to dealers. Sometimes they're spent. Sometimes they're deposited in banks, which sometimes return them to the suppliers.

Again, it's The Circle Of (numismatic) Life.