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.
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.
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