Here's The Change Part...

I had a sort of similar experience with one of those change machines you find in drugstores and grocery stores. There’s a company called Coinstar that provides machines that count your change, charge you 8.9¢ for every dollars it counts, and then you take a receipt the machine gives you to the cash register and they give you money. Keep in mind that Coinstar’s trademarked motto is “You Give Us Coins, We Give You Cash.” So the idea is that you get cash for your coins….

Here’s the catch: Say you turn in $100.50 in change, you’re charged $8.90 cents for their service on the $100, and then roughly .04¢ on the remaining .50¢. So you take your receipt to the register, and they give you $100.50 minus $8.94, which equals $91.56. Okay, but think about it: They’re essentially giving you back .56¢ in change that’s absolutely no different from the change you originally put in the machine, and they’re actually charging you to give this change back to you. Transforming change into bills is a service, but taking change from you, and then giving it right back in the form of more change, why should you have to pay for that?

Lets go back to the “buy one gallon” analogy from earlier. Put .99¢ in one of these machines, they count it, subtract their 8.9% fee, and then give you back .90¢ in change. You’ve essentially paid them to simply count your change and give you back less change than the change you put in.

Now imagine tens of thousands of these machines all across the country, and every time they’re used they’re charging people for small amounts of change that they just wind up giving right back. What a racket.

Unrelated in a somewhat related way… don’t you think jukeboxes should give you the option of selecting three and a half minutes of silence?