Yes, Coins Too

So the main gist of the article is that coinstar (through the ingenuity of 3 college students) is the driving force behind the reduction of production capacity at the U.S. mint. In that now the U.S. population have an easy means of converting the spare change that is laying around our homes. Now we are paying someone to convert our coins into currency. Therefore once again the American public is at fault for layoffs that the mint will having in their labor force. In the words of that great comic strip character Pogo, "We have met the enemy and they are us!"

They did find a nice niche to make money from people who don't want to wrap their own coins.

Your article is truly thought provoking on a number of fronts and as I was reading it a number of thoughts went through my mind ranging fron technological ingenuity of how one innovation can lead to other problems and solutions. It was really thought provoking.

Interesting article. Seems like 2010 (the year referenced in the article) is a very low year. There were about 8B cents-nikels-dimes-quarters in 2011 and we're already up to 4.5B in 2012.

Again, this is a huge drop-off from other years (for instance, 2000 when there were 14B cents minted alone).

However, I would also suspect that it's not just a function of CoinStar but also of the fact that many people do cashless transactions 100% of the time.

So, can we say the Coinstar effect is getting older, better coins out there in the wild to be found?