The Coinstar Conspiracy.

I concur Hobo, I agree with your facts. However there some pretty linear minded users of the machine that don't break down the cost comparisons between counting yourself, using coinstar, etc. It is a giant ripoff, it's bad investing as well for saving an hour or two of time. By the time a customer sees the $47 fee, I'm thinking they're thinking less of the "internal drop bin" and more about how they could have just counted the change themselves.

 

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Same with buying gas, everyone thinks they're paying 4.09 a gallon when in reality it is 4.09 & 9/10ths. All those extra 9/10ths add up to some serious money in the course of a couple years.

 

I use the Coinstar for pennies only, the other coins I wrap myself

 

For the record, I have never used a Coinstar machine. (I refuse to pay someone 9% to do something I can easily do myself.)

 

Probably, with the number of coin machines, yes, it probably adds up to thousands. With coin star machines, it only takes each Machine to take in an extra 6 cents each year that it doesn't give back to the customer to make 19,000 machines collect over a thousand dollars. But why would anyone want to have a congressional hearing. That in itself is a big waste of money relative to this matter IMO. That is taxpayers money down the drain.

As far as the hammerlock on locations, I think it may be up to the store to decide if they want to have the machines in there. I know that when they started appearing, that the clerks started telling me I couldn't pay in coins (more than about a dollar or two). That in the future, they would reject it, but there was a machine they had that would count it.

I discussed this with a manager or two along the way, and their argument is that they don't have the time or inclination to mess with change. It's taking money out of their till when they have to pay for employees to do that job. And the road to most places automatically dispensing "change" from a machine instead of from the till is getting firmly locked down. The employees load up the machine, and then when the cash register says 1.83 in change, the person at the register gives the customer a dollar bill and the customer needs to go to the change machine at the counter to get his/her change.

That's the wave of the future. The stores are cutting coins out of the till as much as possible. So they don't want to be bothered. CoinStars for them are a help, not a boondoggle.

I wouldn't be surprised if the stores lease out the machines, where they pay a certain price and get a portion of the profits.

 

Don't most banks offer this service for free? Mine does. I can bring in a bucket full of coins and they happily pass it through their counting machine and give me cash monies for my coins.

IMO - The thing with the bins could have been easily solved by having both reject paths lead to the same external reject bin. If they are putting some rejects into an internal bin, it's for profit. Guaranteed. Why else would they have it inside the machine where the customer can't get to it?

 

You've got to be careful with these automated coin change machines. Yesterday at a grocery store I was owed $3.40 from recycling. The cashier got three one dollar bills from her register and out came a dime and quarter from the coin dispenser. I told her I only received 35 cents from the dispenser so she checked the receipt to make sure she typed in the right amount that I was owed. The receipt was accurate, she found it hard to believe the machine shorted me. I informed her that I know my math as I have taken 5 mathematics courses at my college. She begrudgingly got a nickel from her register and handed it to me.

 

I had a Coke machine steal a dollar from me last week.

Damn vending machine conspiracies!

 

NOS, I agree. You can't always take the machine to be accurate. But the girl begrudgingly getting a nickle out of her till? That's exactly what it's coming to. The stores don't want their clerks to have to handle any coins, except what people give them in exact change. Pretty soon you will have clerks who can't count out change at all, since they won't be required to. They have machines to count out and dispense that change.

 

Lol I think the real problem here is not that you suggest there will be machines to count out the coins and possibly bills you use at the store. But that there would be people who passed elementary school and can not count to 100.

 

I had a soda that costs 1.50. I put 2 dollars in, got 2 nickels in return. So I kicked it and it dropped 8 quarters out.

 

We have that now and have had it for years. Sad, but true.

 

Speaking of coinstar, I found a 2 euro coin, 2 Bermuda quarters, a, what I think is a proof Canadian nickle, and a US dime and nickle.

 

This is about the size of it.

The machine isn't rejecting a coin if it retains it so it is not a reject bin. It is a theft bin. But it's not the bin doing the stealing. I can think of numerous ways to deal with this but am not sure I want to state them publicly. My friends and family have already been warned.

I should add that if it only keeps slugs I would have no problem with it.

 

I have used them but only when I'm doing home upgrades at lowes. If you use their gift certificate option (most offer lowes, amazon and a couple others) there is no fee. So when doing CRH, it's a great place to dump coins and get a gift cerificate for home improvement. Other than that? They can take their 9% and shove it where the sun dont shine.

 

Hardly. There is no way for the machine to differentiate between an outdated coin and a slug. These machines do things purely by the size of the coin. If the coin is not a size that corresponds to a standard, circulation coin, then it assumes it is trash and puts it in the reject bin. It's not intentionally stealing anything. It assumes that, whatever the thing is not the size of a standard coin, then the user could be trying to cheap out the system using slugs or foreign coins or the like. To deter that from happening, it doesn't give back the rejects. Makes sense to me.

These people are not purposely stealing anything. It's simply how the machine works in order to prevent fraud and people are warned as such. If you have that much of a problem with it, well then, here's a solution: don't use the machines!

 

Did you find that in the internal trash bin, or the outside rejection bin????? The one the customers don't seem to notice is there. Either because they don't notice or assume that anything rejected is useless to them???????)

 

I'm still torn on this. Of course I think it's unreasonable for them to be able to identify every type of coin ever minted in the US, much less foreign coins, so I think they should return everything they don't count to the external reject bin. Unfortunately for them, that would include slugs, but it's the right thing to do for their customers.

Some people say the machine warns you not to put in silver dollars and what not, and people should cull those out first, but this isn't a normal vending machine. You aren't putting in individual coins. You are dumping a bucket of unsorted coins into the machine and trusting the machine to sort them out.

There it is.

 

If I present a pile of morgan dollars to a bank teller and she puts them in her purse and then says she doesn't recognize these because they are obsolete, or the wrong size and refuses to return them then she is guilty of theft and I'll call the police. If she puts them in her drawer and says it's bank policy then the bank is stealing them and I'm calling the police.

Theft is theft and being automatic doesn't change this fact. Frankly I'm not sure I approve of even bent coins or slugs not being returned. It's still MY bent coin and not their's.

The bottom line is if this internal bin really exists then the contents are not being thrown away. It has value and was taken from the previous owner and probably without his knowlege.

There is precedent for damaging and destroying vending machines. Back in the early days some guy lost a dime in one and the gas station refused to make good on it. He drove his car into it and retrieved his dime. Charges were pressed and he went to trial but the judge found him innocent based on the fact it was his dime. There are far more subtle ways to be sure thieves don't prosper.

Of course at this point it's just hearsay that these things are stealing.

 

Oye vey don't get me started on this- I run into folks who can't count change all the time- and even bills sometimes. Last week, the cashier in the drive through had to get a manager to approve the $2 bills i was spending!