ToplessRideFL wrote:RinglingRingling wrote:He gets a story out of it. Hardest part was probably finding 12000 pennies.
Every year we roll our change for extra cash when vacation time comes around. The last 2 years I have refused to roll the pennies so I just dumped them in a shoe box. Last week I took the full shoe box to one of those machines in the grocery store that counts your change.
There were 6619 pennies... (and 3 dimes I guess we missed) ! It took 10 minutes standing at that silly machine but better than 2 days rolling!
When I was growing up, "in the middle of podunk nowhere"
(according to The Tumour), the banks had change counters and were happy to take boxes/jars/jugs of coins and turn them into paper money for you. This continued thru college, and even thru my first couple real jobs after college. Then I moved to OH.
Seems that banks here had never heard of the concept of "customer service." Fortunately for me, life with The Tumour meant that I never really had any spare change build-up
so this wasn't much of a concern... Then, I moved into a new place, and started having a change build-up.
Three years ago, I thought it was time to take my two jars of coins in and get them converted/deposited into my savings account. "Oh, we don't do that. You need to roll them yourself and bring them in. Or you can take them to Kroger, they have a machine that does it there." For some reason, my bank didn't see the humour in my response. I even offered to draw them a map
and a diagram of how to do it so they really could go $*(^%*(&$ themselves on that dumb idea. (See, they charge merchants for change orders, so by extension: they would be getting my time and labour, for free, and making a profit off of that. Add to that the fact that Coinstar charges you 8% of the total for "the service", and pays in store "scrip" and you might see where I had a problem.)
In the meantime, a couple trips to MN and checking with the home bank (long story), showed that they were still providing free counting services for loose change, no matter the quantity. Occasional checks with the local bank chain still got the "you need to roll your own, initial the rolls, and bring them in to us." story.
About 4 months ago, I went into the local branch of my local bank. They were advertising a new service: "A change counter has been installed at 9 of our locations". $165 later... I asked for my map and diagram back.
They didn't see the humour...