Just curious what others are doing with their jars of coins. I used to roll these annually and deposit them at the bank, but now my bank doesn't trust me in that regard. Thinks I might be trying to sell them a roll of washers.
They did offer to take my coins, and send them out to a coin-counting company for a mere 1% of the value, then credit my account. That seems reasonable, at least compared to the supermarket rip-off machines. I wonder whether I can trust them, though. Maybe the coin-counting company takes 1% plus 1 fat handful.
Last year I just decided to buy lunch with them until I'd used them up, but that gets tedious.
My local US Bank has a coin counting machine in the lobby; dump in the coins, and you get a voucher. The last time I went in (about a month ago), I ended up with about $150.
My bank (Harris) cheerfully (okay cheerfully may be a little bit of an exageration) takes my bowl full of loose coins, runs them though the counting machine and then gives me 100% of the results.
My credit union does the same thing. And it is a really fast counter, much, much better than the Coinstar machines. Looks like a small washing machine, you open the lid and dump the coins in. $100 in mostly small coins took a few seconds to count.
*Time for a new bank. TD Ameritrade bank in NJ has free coin counting machines for customers and non-customers. The machine spits out a ticket which you give to the teller and he/she gives you cash. No charge. If you guess the exact amount that the machine counts they give you a prize.
Ditto here. Our bank is actually cheerful. They drop them in the counter and it deposits in rollable stacks. I usually have a pretty good idea of the amount when I take them in and they are accurate.
BTW - This is not a new capability. We have a 100 or so year old coin counter in our museum. Same principle as new ones. Dump coins in a hopper and they come out in stacks ready for rolling. Of course it isn't digital but the stack trays are graduated with lines to tell how much is in the stack. Doesn't work anymore because coins are different that they were in early 1900's
My bank doesn't have a coin counter. I have filled an empty Rolaids bottle with coins and keep it in my car console. When I eat at the drive through, I give correct change. If the line is long and I have a lot of quarters, I pay with all change.
The operative words are "the exact amount that the machine counts". If you can perfectly count $100 in change and the machine matches that number I would be amazed. The real question would be, what keeps you from rat holing a handful of change and feeding it until you hit the magic number.
The prize is probably a bank calendar or a pen anyway.
You see, I used to count quarters for a living. In between repairing pinballs, jukes,... I would collect the money and count, sometimes by hand and sometimes with a portable coin counter machine. After making a $10 roll of quarters you wouldn't believe how easy it became to feel if it's short a quarter or has one extra. And well I've worked on quite a few coin counting machines, and they are accurate.
Back in the stone age, when I was a kid and then college student in southern IN, every bank branch had a counting machine, and as long as you didn't come in when the tellers were swamped, would happily cash out coffee cans full of change. It was a rude shock when I was exiled to SW MI in 1980, and tried to do the same thing, and they looked at me like I was an alien. I did just sort them into jugs for several years, but after having my apartment robbed and several 5 gallon water jugs of pennies poured out into all my luggage so they could carry it (thankfully they missed the pyrex liters of dimes sitting on the shelf 2 feet away), I switched to rolling them. The pile is getting pretty heavy, though. I probably oughta wheel all the boxed rolls into the credit union down the street, and open another account to use for on-line. Just fill out the forms, hand them the boxes, and tell them I'll be back in a few days to learn the balance.
Lately, though, I have been trying to spend it as fast as I accumulate it. Grab a fistfull out of the container on the kitchen counter as I leave the house, and if total at cash register is $x.75 or less, pay the odd amount with coins. Unless of course there is a line behind me- people do get cranky.
Yeah, on principle, I won't pay a premium to cash out coins. If I never get around to cashing them out, I'll leave them to whoever my youngest living relative is.
Same with "cutting chips" when a dealer in Las Vegas. You can "cut" a stack of 20 chips every time 100 times in a row. That is what gets you from the dollar learners table to the better tables.
I had five bars in Harris and Galveston County, Texas over the years.
We had pool tables, juke boxes, cigarette machines, etc. in our bar, provided by the local "Dixie Mafia", although the Justice Department declared there was no such thing. (I wonder which state they were checking, but it wasn't Texas, and I wonder which state of consciousness they were operating under.) You can get pretty good at "cutting" a $10 stack of quarters in a short time. And if you're off a little, no matter.
Our count went something like this:
Pile all the money on the pool table.
A small handful ($15 or so) in a cup kept at the register to keep the juke box playing, and to reimburse anyone who had ANY problem with a pool machine, etc. And to go back and put some quarters on the pool tables and pinballs for "fun money."
A GREAT BIG handful split two ways: one for the route collector, and one the bar owner. Whatever you could scoop in two hands.
What was left was divided by 2, and that's what went down on paper as "income" for the IRS.
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