"It sounds like a slot machine"

Rob and I went down to the grocery store to see about getting Amazon gift certificates from the Coinstar machine. I pretty much gave up on the concept of Coinstar when I found out it charged nearly 9% to count your coins, but they've partnered up with some retailers and will waive the fee if you buy a gift card or certificate with your coins.

I had thought it'd be like those casino machines: dump a whole bucket of coins in and just wait. Not so. The bucket is rather small, about 8 inches by 4 inches, and you can't just dump it: you have to kind of sweep the coins into a maybe 1/8" slot at the end only a few at a time in order to avoid clogging.

I had a plastic half-yard margarita glass full of coins: 162 quarters, 257 dimes, 227 nickels, and 756 pennies which netted me a sweet $85.11 of Amazon shopping. Nice!

Rob's coins were in a small tote bag, and were quite heavy to carry around -- maybe 30 pounds? He stood at the machine for about 10 minutes, because of the tiny coin slot. An older woman, no doubt an Indian casino veteran, walked by and remarked "Ooh, it sounds like a slot machine." Somewhere, Pavlov is smiling. Anyway, at the end of his task, he came out with over $200 in coinage, including over 4000 pennies. Yow. I figured that if each cash transaction yields an average of 2 pennies, that meant his change pile was the result of more than 2000 cash transactions, since he probably spent pennies at least some of the time. Yikes.