Hey Jbuck, Any Word From Your Vendor Friend Yet?

Still nothing.

I am beginning to wonder if he retired. He may have sold his business. I doubt it though, he is not that much older than me.

I did observe a man servicing the vending machines at the grocery store this weekend. I think my curiosity made him nervous, so I moved along to the Coinstar. The two kids feeding it did not appreciate my presence either.

Home empty handed.

However, I did notice that the Coinstar now lets one put their dump into a PayPal account. Interesting.

No, looks like it still has the fees.

https://www.coinstar.com/paypal

But it also appears that you can withdraw cash from PayPal (for a fee, of course).

Are these Chinese coin mechs, what they use in the vending machines manufactured for the U.S. and Canada? Because, if so, there's me and jbuck's answer to the question: "Can vending machines be set up to accept and dispense halves?" (Or at least, the "accept" part)

As for the problems with self checkout machines being able to dispense $2 bills, one of my local Meijer stores said that, the self checkouts have a limited amount of space for bill cassettes, which dispense bills in change, and that, the machines would have to be made a little bigger to add a $2 bill cassette (not sure about dispensing halves, as far as self checkouts go, but I'll bet that dealing with dispensing halves would be easier than dealing with dispensing $2 bills). I was thinking, say self checkouts have five bill cassetts, one for $1s, $5s, $10s, $20s, and $50s, and the $100s, currently being the largest denomination in circulation, would just go into a storage compartment in the machines, and say one of those bill changer cassettes was set up to give out $50s. I think if this were the case, they should stop with using a $50 bill changer cassette, because, how many people use $100 bills these days when people are mostly handed ot $20s, and change the bill cassettes to $1s, $2s, $5s, $10s, and $20s, because, in my opinion, more people are going to be dealing with $2 bills and other smaller denominations than $50 bills these days,, so, why not get some use out of $2s, have the machines keep all $50s and $100s and put on the parts required for halves and get some use out of those as well?

Do CoinStar machines even "accept" silver coins? I thought they were only programmed to accept copper and zinc pennies, copper clad nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, and (cupro clad and brass) small dollar coins. (No large copper clad (Ike) dollars or steel 1943 wartime pennies)

Do CoinStars actually accept silver coins? I'm asking, because I'm not risking the experiment to lose a silver coin.

Wow.. Will coinstar even accept a silver coin?

I am very interested on the answer to this as well? The last time I dumped my change into one, I found a '57 dime which was odd considering I look through the dates of all my coins before I put them into my jug.

Whose got the guts to attempt this experiment?

Nothing yet.

By the way, you should refer to him as a vendor acquaintance. This might help explain why I have no heard from him yet

Also, and why I have not tried to call him back since the first attempt. It has been long enough though, I should probably call again.