As I mentioned here, I've been throwing pocket change into jars for 20+ years and have recently been hauling it in to dump into Coinstar machines at local merchants. There was too much to handle in one trip so I did it in three loads. The first, a small "test" bag of coins, yielded about $40. in Amazon credit. The second, last night, amounted to $273.18, which is all I could carry. That worked out to one half dollar, 681 quarters, 662 dimes, 410 nickels and 1,573 pennies…or so says my Coinstar receipt.
Today, I hauled in the last of it: 572 quarters, 466 dimes, 349 nickels and 862 pennies for a total of $216.67. I did not bother checking the machine's math. I trust it.
An odd thing: The machine sorts all the coins out and rejects foreign and unrecognizable ones. You can put them into the hopper again and sometimes, second time through, it will accept a few of them. But at the end of all this, I had about 20 coins which the machine just plain didn't want and I finally took a closer look at them. Two turned out to be old dimes made of silver. A few were foreign. There was one token to gain admittance to a pay toilet at some restaurant and one coin was one of those gold dollar coins with the portait of Sacagawea on it that no one used. But a couple turned out to be magic coins…by that, I mean coins that have been gaffed or rigged for magic tricks. I do a little magic but I can't recall ever owning or using any of these and can't imagine how they got into my jars. I may actually have received them as change somewhere — maybe the Magic Castle, even — and didn't look closely enough to note that, for example, one is a two-headed nickel and another is a dime on one side and a penny on the other. Glad the Coinstar machine kicked 'em out as they're worth a lot more than their face value, no matter which side is up.
Another thing I noticed. For years, I've been writing comic books where crooks run out of banks holding big sacks of coins. It hadn't dawned on me how much a sack of coins can weigh. I'm a pretty big guy and I couldn't carry more than $300 in coins. How did those Beagle Boys do it all those years?
Also, if you do this, do yourself a favor and either take along some moist towelettes or pick a store where the Coinstar machine is near the bathroom. In Las Vegas, people develop "coin fingers" after feeding money into slots or video poker machines for a couple of hours. After ten minutes of taking coins from a big canvas bag and throwing them in the Coinstar hopper, my right hand could have doubled for Jack Haley's in The Wizard of Oz.
One last thing I'll mention in case you never take this many coins to a Coinstar machine…as you feed them in, a little video window flashes messages like, "Feed your coins into the hopper now" and "Press the red button when you are finished." If you get too far ahead of the counting mechanism, it puts up a notice that says, "My, you have a lot of coins." Well, I used to. Now, I have a lot of credit at Amazon.