Coinstar Finds! (Including Bank Counters And Other Machines)

Nice score, cabowabo!

At the beginning of September I checked my supermarket's Coinstar machine as I always do after buying my groceries. The bin was lousy with coins of all shapes and sizes! As I began sifting through them, I could see that they were mostly foreign coins. I began filling up my pockets, but then they were full, so I had to put the rest of the coins in my grocery bag.

When I got home, I counted them up and found I had come away with 225 coins. Mostly Japanese, South Korean and Canadian, with a few others (Mexican, Cayman Islands, Hong Kong and others). It took me several weeks, but I identified, assigned values I found on the Internet and stapled each coin into a 2x2. (As I was going through the Japanese coins, I learned how to translate their non-Gregorian numbering system into Gregorian. It was a nice bit of knowledge to acquire!) I then calculated the total value to be just over 40 U. S. dollars.


Naturally I was on the hunt for anything American and preferably silver. A few months ago I posted about how I'd found a 1940-S Washington quarter in the same machine. Well, I wasn't so lucky this day, but I'm not complaining:



1953-D Roosevelt dime
1959-D Roosevelt dime
1964 Roosevelt dime

1929 LWC
1943 LWC

A couple of special dates for me: I was born in 1959 and my mom was born in 1929.

I went to my local coin dealer and told him the story. I was trying to figure out how over 200 coins ended up in a Coinstar machine. One thought I had was that I live in a college town that has a large number of international students. It was the beginning of the school year, and perhaps one of these students who wasn't sure how the machine worked thought that it would convert coins he'd brought from home into American currency. When it didn't work that way, he left in a huff without bothering to retrieve his coins. (Another possibility is that he did get a voucher for cash, thought that was it and didn't bother to check the bin. Maybe he didn't even know there was a reject bin.)

This was a fun experience. Coinstar been berry berry good to me!

Thanks man!

Very nice score jpsned congrats. I picked these up from a couple of machines this week.

Fantastic!

Interesting.

Nice finds, cabowabo!

Fantastic!