Doing the Coinstar thing
You may or not have heard of Coinstar.
It’s a simple format, pour your loose coinage into the big machine and they count it, sort it and convert it to notes. I went along to Tesco in Lisburn on Saturday morning with a bag of coin, hit the start button and poured it in. I would have been happy with around £15 however to my shock I had managed to gather up £50 in coin which worked out at around £45 after their 8.9% commission.
Some might think that 8.9% commission to convert coin into notes is a steep price to pay, however I had over 1800 1pence pieces and I can’t imagine I would have sat down and counted that myself by hand. To me, like most people bronze coin is dead money and you forget it is actual money as you can’t spend it in any great quantity so to me the £45 was just like getting free money.
Love it, can’t wait to have another go – the process is quite fun to and if you don’t want the cash you can press a button to give it straight to any of the 50 listed charities on the machine.
From Coinstar’s website
Over £400 million is lost in homes across the UK and Coinstar wants to find the UK equivalent to Edmond Knowles who cashed in 1,308,459 pennies (or $13,084.59) at his local Coinstar machine.
I first used a Coinstar machine in Harris Teeter (http://www.harristeeter.com/), our local supermarket in NC. They also issued iTunes vouchers for your change, which I thought was pretty cool, I emptied all the US change we had collected in to it before we left and got a hefty amount of iTunes credit
Mother got a few quids from her stuff and I’ve got a shed load of coins, seems pretty cool!
How much, how much ?
It is quite a bit of fun.
iTunes vouchers sounds good Simon, their website speaks of vouchers however not in Tesco. Must be location dependent.
Not so wise when you cannot see that Simon is in North Carolina, USA, where there’s no Tesco (see… they picked first, that’s why they have Walmart and you guys have Tesco)
Which company you say you work for?