TerminalDigit

Coinstar Rocks

I have a problem with coins. I hate them. I’m not sure why we’re still using little pieces of paper and metal as currency, but we are, so I guess I have to deal with it. The paper isn’t so bad, but the coins with their annoying weight, bulk, and cacophonous clink, clink, clink are too much for me to handle.

So I leave them at home. And there they pile up. This presents another problem: my apartment is not Scrooge’s vault (unfortunately), and having a bunch of coins lying around seriously messes up my kickin’ Zen aesthetic. For a while, I tried to get rid of them by carrying 10 coins (4 pennies, 3 quarters, 2 nickels, 1 dime—the fewest coins you can carry and still pay in exact change for anything; 1 nickel and 2 dimes also works), but that ended when I realized that having 10 coins in my pocket was usually more than the number of coins I’d receive as punishment for not paying in exact change. Basically this is an extremely long-winded way of saying this: I had a lot of coins, and I needed to get rid of them.

Enter Coinstar. The big, green, coin-counting machine in the corner of many grocery/drug stores. Here’s how it works. You dump your coins in it, it counts them, subtracts a steep 8.9% counting fee, and then gives you a receipt for the balance which you cash at the store’s register. Sounds like a nice idea, except I’m not about to hand over 9 cents of my dollar to a machine.

Enter Amazon.com. The biggest Internet superstore in existence, with pockets deep enough to fund things like waiving the counting fee on Coinstar machines if you get your money as an Amazon gift card rather than as cash. Perfect. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time, so this will work great.

I went to the nearest Sav-On drug store, found the machine, and began the drill: deposited my coins, selected the Amazon gift card option, confirmed my choice, super duper confirmed it, and off it went. Clink, clank, clink, clank . . . finished. $16.63. Printing Amazon gift receipt . . . ERROR. So it printed me a cash voucher instead, after, of course, deducting the $1.48 counting fee.

I was pretty annoyed by this, not because $1.48 is a lot of money, but because it really felt like a bait-and-switch. Anyway, I wasn’t going to bug the poor kids working at the store about it, since they couldn’t do anything anyway, so I took my $15.15 from them and went home to write Coinstar a mean little e-mail. That was pretty cathartic in itself, and I hit the “Send” button and went on with my life.

Enter Coinstar Customer Service. Possibly the nicest customer service people I’ve ever encountered. By the next morning, I had in my inbox an apologetic e-mail instructing me to call their customer service phone number so that they could sort the whole thing out. On the phone, I got the most profuse apology I’ve ever received in my life, and a promise that a check for $1.48 would be mailed to my address within the next 3 business days. And so it was. Wow.

So thanks, Coinstar, for making things right. When my coin jar fills up again, I’ll be sure to bring it your way. :-)