Coin Counting Machines At Banks And Other Locations

How big is your collection that you
need a coin counting machine ?

I hadn't thought about people dishonestly shorting a roll or substituting a coin for a roll returned to the bank. How naive of me. If that is the reason for the charge, it is indeed unfortunate, but as with so many things in life, we do it to ourselves. there is always someone trying to cheat or get away with something. I have thousands of coins of all denominations that are sitting in buckets that I would love to turn in----but I have this thing about being charged 8% for the privilege of exchanging coin for currency.

From a business prospective, here is a little justification of the money spent on operating one of these machines. Lets say the machine cost $12,000. If we have over 1,000 stores the initial investment would be over $12,000,000 plus shipping and set up. For the one machine we have at our store it would take $150,000 in change being cashed in to pay for it. I would guess this would take about a year to a year and a half. These machines use plenty of electricity, as the computer runs continuously all day, plus the machine actually running. Besides the electricity, there are also other supply costs (receipt paper, coin bags, and cleaning supplies). We also pay someone to look at it when an alarm goes off (Often can take up to 30 minutes to trouble shoot it). We pay someone to take bags off of machine, move the bags of coins to cash office, someone to record the deposit of it, and the armed guards to pick it up. The internal sensors often get clogged with debris, and the machine malfunctions. For this we have to call a service technician out to fix it. The cheapest repair bill I have seen is in excess of $500.
We're not a bank and the financial reward is all we get out of this, as the coins are not reused they are sent to a bank. I'm not saying that we're not making any money, but after all is said and done, it takes a while to make a profit off of one of these machines. Bad luck can make you or break you on these (ex. a faulty machine). I don't think 8% is that far of an outcry.

BD

Home Federal is here in Id. Maybe Wash? They have counters, even this tiny branch.

Look for the commercial branches of your local banks, i.e. the ones that draw a significant portion of their branch transactions from businesses. Not many neighborhood banks have coin counters anymore due to costs involved but they can typically be found at larger commercial locations. And of course, you will need an account at the bank.

When talking to a officer of one of the banks I go to we discussed the stopping of coin counting machines. Some of the reasons he mentioned are people used to come in and purchase a bag of coins. Then a few days later they would bring them back. Then a few days later the same people come back and try to buy another bag of coins. They do this to look through them for their collections. Each time they do this a teller has to stop what they are doing, usually go to a vault, get the bag for the customer. Sometimes those bags are heavy and a guard has to stop what he is doing to assist. Now the nest day that person comes back with that bag of coins to be counted so the teller has to lock up everything again, take the bag to the coin counter, if heavy ask someone else to assist again.
Meanwhile look at the line of people that have REAL banking buisness and have to wait for that person that does this all the time. Who pays for that service? How do you tell real customers to just wait since this person is here again with his bag of coins?
Then too there are many that bring in rolls of coins. They think they are outsmarting the bank since every roll is short a coin or two. And some of the rolls have washers in them. Each roll must be opened and the coins counted. Who pays for that service?
As the bank official pointed out he works for a company like many other people and his company is the bank. That company is here to make a profit, not loose money to accomodate coin collectors.
He said I'm sorry but that is just one of the reasons Bank of America in this area stopped coin counting machines and this will spread to other banks if people keep playing around.

I grew up in MN and had a Wells Fargo bank account. All Wells Fargo's in my area had coin counters that us bank customers could use for free. Then I moved to CA and no Wells Fargo's have coin counters. They only accept self counted and wrapped rolls. Not sure why it's different. The ones back in MN still have the counters so its not like they just happened to take them out of all their banks right around when I moved.