I saw a commercial on television and have always been curious about Coinstar machines so I checked out their website:

http://www.coinstar.com/us/html/a-home

Check out the Coinstar Trivia section. It tells you how much the average amount of money is in different types of containers.

What I wonder is how many valuable collectible coins get dumped into those things and what the true value of the coins is, not the face value.

Has anybody ever heard anything about anybody finding anything special at one of these places or do the owners keep the coins and information all to themselves?

wow I got 3 in my Area. . . .

Do you think if I emailed them, they would let me go and search through all the coins they collect in a week in my area????

Most of the GOOD stuff drops thru into the coin return. The machines are set for the modern clad so everything else is rejected. I check them regularly and find lots of goodies left in the return. Items include game tokens, foreign coins, US silver, Wheaties and modern clad that has any problem(dirty, etc).
The machine closest to my house has a problem with nickels. Once this past summer I pulled over $3 in regular nickels from the machine. Last saturday I got a '43 Canadian Tombac nickel.

Well I emailed coinstar and here is there response ....

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately Coinstar is not set up in a way that would make what you are thinking about possible. Our machines are actually emptied by armored car companies that take the coins to their processing locations where the coins are then re-counted and sorted and then put back into circulation.

If you have any other questions please let us know.

Sincerely,
Wiley Scutt
Coinstar Customer Service

I know the senior management team at Coinstar as I used to cover them as an analyst when I lived in Seattle. I have been to their headquarters in Bellevue, and the technology is very interesting. They have the standard weight screens, but they also have image recognition technology which explains why some older types of coins are rejected. As for the e-mail response, it is accurate, as the company itself has no real contact with what it placed in their machines. They only control the network of machines so they can service machines quickly when they are full or experiencing technical difficulties. All the coins are handled by the armored service.

So, if I have a poo load of pennies and I'm not looking for anything but Wheaties, I could take them to Coinstar, pay a small fee, and it would do the sorting for me and spit back the Wheaties?!?

I have a picture of this nice looking gentleman walking along a sidewalk and seeing a Coinstar machine; his eyes dart left and right and he dashes up and sticks his finger in the coin return, nabs something from it, runs up the street, around the corner and secretly admires what he has found. Don't worry--I'm still a kid at heart--I check out coin returns, too! Hard to imagine people not figuring out they had change returned and just leaving it there but I know it happens with other types of vending machines. Thanks for the info.!

I shoulda' thought of that. Thanks for e-mailing and posting response, Brett! I'm glad to hear they don't keep the good stuff!

Very interesting, Jeff. Thanks for sharing! Gosh we have people who have all kinds of coin 'connections'. Did you ever talk to them about changing their methods and sending all the good stuff to you? I think I'd give it the old college try.

I've got two in mine. Ever use one? Wonder what kind of fee there is for it?

Well, I certainly thought about it, but as an analyst it would have compromised my independence, something I refuse to do.



Last I heard, the fee was 9%, though that might have changed (the last time I covered the company was early 2004.



In theory you could, however depending on the volume of coins it is by no means 100% certain. I performed several random tests on their machines, and included some Canadian cents in the coins I put into the sorter (along with some other foreign coins and slugs and buttons), and they did accept a few of the Canadian cents. The purpose of the software is to protect against the larger errors. If I recall correctly, a few years ago there was a latin American coin worth a few cents which had the same size and weight as a dollar coin, and machines without the software were paying our $1 each for those coins, needless to say that wiped out the 9% fee pretty quickly! If it was up to me, I would still sort through the pennies looking for wheaties by hand, after all that's a big part of the fun, the search!

All our CoinStars are inside busy grocery stores so its even worse. I usually try to look like I'm going to use the machine. I've even considered carrying a bunch of ChuckEchees tokens to dump into the machine so they would get rejected and I could snag everything in the return. Another good ploy is purchase a scratch off lotto and use the CoinStar area to scratch it, checking out the returnas you do. I have seen dozens of other people checking out the returns.

I once found $1.26 in the reject bin of a coinstar machine. All the coins looked like they had been out in a parking lot and run over many times. They were all scratched up and most were from the 1990's

Just curious as to why everyone tries to be sneaky about checking the returns? I check the arcade machines at the laundry all the time.

One time at the mall I was trying to win this toy for my sister. The machine took my quarter but didn't get a play. Gave it a swift kick......out came $2.75 in quarters that were jammed

Went to the grocery this morning and as we went in there was a guy there dumping his change in. As we went out I checked the return. Just one dime, but it was a 1959-D.

If they used image recognition they would probably only return half of the wheaties. Their weight it right and on average half of them will be obverse "up" toward the sensor. They would probably be accepted and the reverse "up" pieces would be the ones rejected.

I always check the returns.

The only thing I've ever found was a beat up bronze coin from Honduras.

I always check the CoinStar machines. I don't care who likes it or doesn't. If the folks who dumped the coins wanted the stuff in the return shute they would have taken it.

I've found quite a few world coins just placed on top of the machine. So folks obviously don't want them. If there are kids around, I usually give the coins to them.

There was something on the news a while back, a guy robs a coin collector's house, and takes hundreds of rare HALF CENTS. He didn't know what to do with them, so he went to a coinstar and tried to cash them in. Needless to say, the machine jammed and the police found him outside with a few hundred 2x2's.

Thanks for the tips!

Hmmm...maybe I've been silly for not checking coin returns all these years--somehow it seems like I was taught not to but I'm not sure the reason why. I sense a disturbance in the force...a poll is coming on!

I wish I could find the trivia section Kat was talking about.