While I don't mind that coinstar machines seem to reject silver in my area, I find a few in the tray sometimes, why? After reading different topics it seems that they could be set to accept or reject silver coins. Wouldn't coinstar, or other companies, want more coins in their machines? It means more money for them. Anyone have any ideas? I suppose this could apply to the penny arcade machines I read about on the east coast. Coinstar is what we have in my area and almost no banks have machines.
Maybe it has something to do with weight, silver coins weigh more... throws machine off. Coinstar prob figures most silver is out of circulation anyway.
Perhaps (just a theory here) when the CoinStar company processes the millions upon millions of coins they receive from the public through their machines, they sort the coins by metric ton, and Silver weighs more than Cu/Ni clad... So, hypothetically speaking - If one Silver dime for every one-hundred Cu/Ni clad dimes (1:100) is transacted via their kiosks, and the Silver dimes are double the weight (again, this is all hypothetical) of the Cu/Ni clad dimes (1:2), the CoinStar company is out 10¢ for every $10.00 they convert for the public.
I hadn't thought of the weight thing. It all get rolled and boxed at some point though, right? I roll search, and find silver, so it gets into the system. Maybe just by other means.
Yes, by other means. There are still plenty of people who are taking their old jars filled with pocket change they've been collecting for decades, emptying them out to pay bills and buy groceries, rolling the coins up themselves, and turning it all into the bank... Oooor those same people could take the CoinStar route, which outs you 9.8% of the total face value of coins that took decades to acquire. Personally, I'd choose the former.
It's rather simple really. Coinstar was not taking into consideration that there would be people out there who are not knowledgeable about silver coinage, since the last of silver coinage was made for circulation in the early 70s.
Whenever I use a Coinstar machine, I get the amazon.com code. It charges you no fee when you do that. I order from Amazon all the time, so it works out great.
Or, they might have known, but it was too much of a hassle to accomodate. For example, one course of action would be to give the customer credit for the face value of the silver, but keep the silver in a separate bin so they could sell them for more money. But then they'd have to design and build that capability into their machines and who knows how long this will last. Eventually, finding silver coins in circulation is going to fade away. Plus, there's the PR nightmare if the public discovered such a nefarious activity. Or, they could just accept them and give the customers face value for them and sell them to the bank at face value. It could be that they chose not to do this for the benefit of the customer. I think the best thing to do is what they're doing now. Just reject them. It's not like they don't give you a bunch of notices to check the reject tray. They tell you when they reject a coin, they tell you randomly thoughout the counting process, and they remind you again when you're printing your receipt. Heck, if you're going shopping at one of the places they offer gift cards to, it might be an efficient way of roll searching. Wouldn't that be funny? A guy sitting at the CoinStar machine tearing open rolls from the bank and feeding them into the machine. :too-funny:
Yes, never print out a receipt for cash and forfeit that 9.8%. That's crazy! I only use CoinStar for cashing in pennies, but I always print out a reciept with a code for use at Lowes. The only thing I'm giving up then is the 1% cash back from my credit card, and 1% of my usual $100 dump is only $1. A reasonable sacrifice to keep new coins coming into my bank.
I know that CoinStar is getting hefty kickbacks from the merchants for whom you can print out gift receipts. Is it 5%? 10%? I would estimate it's somewhere in between. What would be really cool is if CoinStar started offering a little bit of that to their customers. Say 1-2%. That would make up for what I lose for not using my credit card and I'd start bringing more coins in to them. Then they'd get more kickback from the merchants and the merchants would get more business. Win-win-win.
I wonder if the same changes that would let them accept silver coins would also let them accept certain classes of foreign coins they don't want? I see more foreign stuff than silver in the reject bins. (The leader, of course, is "Lincoln cents stuck together".) I saw Euro-cents left at two different CoinStars just Friday. They caught my eye because they're smaller than dimes, but I've already got enough samples of that type...
