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Those aren't money anymore!

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  • Those aren't money anymore!

    It was a typical super-busy weekend evening at the Store yesterday when there was a page on the overhead for me to come to the Coinstar machine. In case you're not aware, Coinstar is a machine that you feed your loose coins into to exchange it for paper money at a (rather exorbitant, IMO) fee of 11.9%. The Coinstar machine is extremely simple to troubleshoot, but for some reason I'm pretty much the only supervisor who works evenings that knows anything about the machine (and that includes my bosses).

    I get up there to find our customer waiting in front of the machine, which is displaying a stock "please wait for employee assistance" message. I log into the machine and it tells me the coin hopper is jammed, so I grab the keys to unlock the machine and open it up.

    Inside the hopper I find about 35 cents in pennies and well over a hundred smashed souvenir pennies - you know, the type where you put a penny and 50 cents into a vending machine, and it smashes the penny and embosses it with a stamp commemorating your visit to East St. Louis or wherever. Coinstar can't accept these, because they're not a shape it recognizes, they're no longer even necessarily the right weight, and most importantly, they are no longer usable as United States currency as they are no longer recognizable.

    I tell the customer the machine can't accept those and he says "But they're still pennies!"



    I don't know what's worse; the fact that we'd probably have just given him a quarter and a dime for his pennies if he'd brought them to the counter and he wouldn't have lost a few cents on the service fee, or that he was so desperate that he actually thought trying to cash in a collection of souvenir pennies was a good idea.

  • #2
    I have a necklace on which hangs a Canadian quarter, which has had all of the material surrounding the caribou carefully removed (normally illegal but I believe there is ONE company that has obtained the rights to do this). Technically it's still a quarter ... but I rather doubt I could use it to pay for anything.

    Some people just don't understand the concept of legal tender and "non-mutilated coinage," I guess.
    Customer service: More efficient than a Dementor's kiss
    ~ Mr Hero

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    • #3
      "But it was made from a penny!"
      "Yes, and I'm sure we could trace some of the water in the beer you're holding to a paddock at Busch Gardens."
      I am not an a**hole. I am a hemorrhoid. I irritate a**holes!
      Procrastination: Forward planning to insure there is something to do tomorrow.
      Derails threads faster than a pocket nuke.

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      • #4
        Quoth Smapti View Post
        In case you're not aware, Coinstar is a machine that you feed your loose coins into to exchange it for paper money at a (rather exorbitant, IMO) fee of 11.9%.
        Whenever a customer comes through the register with a Coinstar slip, I always tell them they can choose to have their payment in the form of a gift card to a variety of online vendors (including Amazon, I believe) and not get charged a fee, and yet they still keep doing it. Is it really worth having cash in hand if that $10 in loose change turns out to be slightly less than $9 once the fees are taken out? I'm sure there's a gift card option for everyone who uses the Coinstar machine, so I don't know why customers keep doing it.

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        • #5
          Quoth Monterey Jack View Post
          ... so I don't know why customers keep doing it.
          I think that comment can be applied to most of the customers we read about on this forum.
          "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

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          • #6
            I thought you were gonna talk about a customer trying to use pennies in Canada, or Deutch Marks in Germany or something.

            This... this is a whoooole other layer of STOO-PID.

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            • #7
              I was walking by the Coin Star while it was being serviced. I chatted briefly with the guy servicing it and he gave a half dozen coins the machine rejected. They were Cuban centavos which are actually worth 1 cent US each. They are about half the size of a US penny. I added them to my somewhat eclectic coin collection.
              "I don't have to be petty. The Universe does that for me."

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              • #8
                There are laws against defacing currency - but they're mainly to prevent currency from being "washed", ie taking a $1 bill, removing the ink and printing the likeness of a $5 bill on top of it. While it's possible a policeman with a hair up his ass might arrest you for turning currency into art, it's highly unlikely.

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                • #9
                  … does that mean that my adorable rendering having given Mr.Lincoln vampire teeth, glasses and a comic moustache would get me into trouble....
                  The Copyright Monster has made me tell you that my avatar is courtesy of the wonderful Alice XZ.And you don't want to annoy the Copyright Monster.

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                  • #10
                    Kit, I think most of what you do should get you into some sort of trouble.
                    My son thinks I'm Lucifer Morningstar. I'm not sure he's wrong.

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                    • #11
                      Quoth Kit-Ginevra View Post
                      … does that mean that my adorable rendering having given Mr.Lincoln vampire teeth, glasses and a comic moustache would get me into trouble....
                      Some sheetheads would love it, but MP Wilberforce will rise up and smite thee.
                      I am not an a**hole. I am a hemorrhoid. I irritate a**holes!
                      Procrastination: Forward planning to insure there is something to do tomorrow.
                      Derails threads faster than a pocket nuke.

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                      • #12
                        I love to get those smashed penny souvenirs. They only cost 51 cents. They don’t take up any room In my luggage. I have a drawer I keep them in after I get home and sharpie the date on the back. Every once in awhile I dump the drawer and reminisce over past trips


                        But I would never try to spend them.

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                        • #13
                          Quoth Kit-Ginevra View Post
                          … does that mean that my adorable rendering having given Mr.Lincoln vampire teeth, glasses and a comic moustache would get me into trouble....
                          If you really want to get into trouble, you can turn Laurier into Spock

                          Sadly it only works on the older 5's; the polymar 5's have him facing differently so it isn't as easy to Spock him.

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                          • #14
                            Does your self check do cash? When I have $10 in change I just spend it at the store with the cash self check. If you are not hurting anything the host doesn't care.

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                            • #15
                              A few things you can do with smashed pennies, from one of my favorite blogs.

                              https://www.epbot.com/2010/07/simply...y-jewelry.html
                              https://www.epbot.com/2012/10/smashe...-in-resin.html
                              https://www.epbot.com/2011/01/pletho...y-jewelry.html

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