Inside The Coinstar Machine

So I cashed in my junk coin jar yesterday and as I got about $10 in to about $100 of coins it apparently jammed and the screen message indicated to ask the store staff for assistance. I did and they came out with a key and followed the instructions on screen after they opened the key-switch.

After they opened the door the curious me watched intently and scoped out the inside of the machine. It appears that store staff has limited access to the interior, basically the counting trays, detritus collection points and the few tools they keep in the door panel. That was the interesting part as I mention below.

There were two detritus collection trays First was a long tan one directly below the dumping tray, extending pretty much the entire width of the machine. This holds much of the dirt, paper bits and other crud that gets tossed in with the coins from people's coffee cans, applesauce jars and other containers. This was chock full of crud and after plucking out the few coins in there (and tossing them into my pile*) they went to the second. This was a smaller one, about the size of a coffee mug just above the reject bin. No coins but still plenty of little bits of trash. She dumped these into the trash and replaced them into the machine.

* (I know these were not my coins as I know I had no Canadian or bent coins in this dump, but afterwards a 2009 Canadian penny and a bent up US quarter clinked into the reject bin.)


As she cleaned out the trays I looked around and on the inside panel of the door was a pocket holding some paperwork, a brush as well as a plastic cup. Inside the cup was a few dozen coins, mostly larger ones that appeared to be around the size of an Ike dollar but obviously not real. With the limited few seconds I had to observe they seemed to be toys or tokens of some sort. Also in that cup was some smaller coins, possibly half-dollar or SBA sized with clad edges. These were just the ones I could see on top, who knows what was under them.

I did ask if I could buy those but they said they weren't allowed to.

Under the machine was completely filthy with 10 or more scattered coins, mostly covered in years of mop-grime but a few identifiable as US pennies and nickels. I suspect there were a bunch more to be found if they ever pulled the machine out from it's cubby next to the lottery machine.

I imagine CoinStar does not let its team keep or even buy coins etc. that are found in their machines and I would guess it would be very hard for a coin collector to work for them. I wonder however these coins and tokens end up in these cups and if all CoinStar machines have similar collections. I would think that coins larger than a half dollar would not even go down the throat of the machine and anything that did make it thru should end up in the reject bin if it was not counted and bagged.