So, I guess this ISN'T "change" we can believe in?

Going Green is the big new PR thing, it's no surprise to me that companies are jumping on the bandwagon so quickly.

You see it's about making people THINK you are doing something to help the environment when there is actually little to no real effect from whatever is being promoted.

It's just more spin.

What's new term for this, GreenWashing? I saw an episode of Penn & Teller B*ll$hit, and they did a special on the green movement. There are people who actually provide therapy to people who are so troubled by the negative impact their existence has on the planet, they need a therapist. This is what makes the "Green" movement so hard to accept for me.

The one good thing BOA did for me (before I moved all of my accounts to USAA), was allow me to dump all of my change into a plastic bank change bag. I'd drop it off with my account info and the amount was posted to my account 2-3 business days later, no cut off the top or anything. I would assume most CUs and other banks do this as well if people would just ask. You don't even need to roll the coins yourself.

So 16oz of coins (1 pound) creates 250lbs of "geological waste"? The only way I could picture that is if you're trying to mine 1 pound of pure copper you might throw away 250lbs of plain old rocks.

SAVE THE ROCKS!

@dragonfire81:
I agree. Slapping the word "Green" on anything these days seems to be more for PR effect. On a related note, I am seeing the pink ribbon for breast cancer research on more and more products. My wife bought a bottle of contact solution with the pink ribbon on it, and my first thought was "Are you kidding me?".

Just an FYI for the commerce machines, count your money before hand. I ran mine through, and the machine was off by a little over a dollar. They credited me the amount the machine was off though, so they are good people.

@Matthew Hughes: remember that pennies are only like 5%copper, and the rest is zinc.

@nursetim: Rush Limbaugh used to rail against stars who would wear a red ribbon, and think they were doing something about AIDS.

what. stupid.

PNC has FREE coin machines. I live in DC, and the dupont circle branch has a machine. Just walk in and dump your change. It prints a ticket which you take to the teller for the FULL VALUE of your coins. The end.

Like many things in this world, I consider using the Coinstar machines (well, specifically paying the fee they charge) to be akin to a stupid tax. Like many above have said, take them to your bank, or if they don't have a machine, find a bank that will do it for free.

when you reuse your change instead of letting it sit idle in your coin jar, fewer coins are produced

So they're trying to make people believe the govt produces coins based on supply and demand, and they're saying if you put your supply back into circulation the govt will somehow know to cut production by 264 coins next year because you did that.

Good grief.

They don't take anything off the top if take a gift card instead of cash.

Whenever I am going to get something from Amazon, I just throw all my change in the coinstar first and get an Amazon gift card out. No extra charge.

Coinstar's ridiculous marketing aside, how can anyone in their right mind pay to have their change counted and converted into paper money? If my bank refused to do this I'd close my account.

Yeah, I think I'll continue counting out my change myself and not letting some scammer steal part of my cash. Which is all Coinstar is as far as I'm concerned - a scam to take advantage of the dumb and lazy. Whether or not the dumb and lazy deserve to be taken advantage of is of course a matter of opinion.

Ah, but the catch is that I'd have to *drive* to get to a Coinstar machine! I think I'll stick to 'reusing' my change by buying things with it.

Hell, even Chase does this for their customers, for free.

I've not seen any free machines to do this before, but I hand-count all mine and roll them myself. It really doesn't take that long. It's actually kind of therapeutic after a stressful day, at least until you get to the end and realize you only have 35 quarters for that final roll.

I agree about the greenwashing marketing madness. I always have wondered, however, just how much change ends up never to be found again for decades or centuries, just how much is gone and potentially still spendable nonetheless.

This is definitely greenwashing.

Coinstar's business model seems to be to prey on those who don't know any better, since they take their cut.

I'll stick to Commerce Bank where they count the coins for free, even if you don't have an account. I do so I can just stick the money into it with no muss or fuss.

@Franklin Comes Alive!:

I consider CoinStar a convenience fee (although, as timmaah notes, I often get an Amazon gift cert). No Commerce Bank near me, but there is a convenient CoinStar, and I'd rather have 91% of something than 100% of nothing.

I use coinstar to make itunes gift cards so I purchase iphone applications. A subtle way to keep those little apps off of my credit card bill.

Union Bank of CA does free coin counting at some branches.

@Git Em SteveDave displays attention-grabbing vanity: 2.5% to be exact, the rest is Zinc, according to the Snopes "Penny on a bee sting" story.

I wrap up my own quarters and dimes ($10 and $5 per roll), they go to the bank and right into savings, but pennies and nickels? Not worth the time, so Coinstar is good enough for me.

Like someone else said, cut Coinstar's juice and get it in an Amazon gift card. Buy yourself something nice, a book or something, a little treat for your pennywisdom.

If anyone is interested, I'm selling carbon credits out of the trunk of my hybrid. It's buy one get three free! No mail-in rebate.

I'm not convinced of the green movement. I think it's propigated by oil execs and anti-globalization people and not out of concern for the environment.

By-the-by, Chevy Chase offers free coin counting. Don't need to be a member.

@Matthew Hughes: yeah, doesn't more paper bills mean less trees?

@savvy999: Coinstar still gets a cut of the coins, even if you buy an amazon.com gift card. I would think even more so than most people think.

Did Coinstar calculate the resources it took to create this new campaign? The additional hours and energy its marketing agency spent toiling away at night with the lights on and AC running? The precious resources and trees it consumed to print junk mail? The donut trees that were over-harvested to feed the CEO in the morning?

Think of the baby seals, then take your coins to your local Bank of America.

Well the greenwashing aspect seems silly to me too. But I have used coinstar in the past (although I do usually get rid of my coins by spending them too), with full awareness of the fee. Stupid? No. Lazy? I'll get back to you on that...

Did Coinstar figure in the additional resources it took to come up with this lame idea? The late-night, oil burning sessions at its ad agency? The paper to print the junk mail on? The powdered baby seal intestine to fill the toner cartridges of its headquarters? The over-harvested donut trees that were killed to fill the CEO's belly?

Meet the new green, same as the old green.

<<<

@Git Em SteveDave displays attention-grabbing vanity: Sort of like those American flag pins.

@Nick1693: I'm a dedicated elongated penny fan, and I don't use "Zincies", only pure copper pennies from my birth year(1978) or 1969(cuz 69 is cool). Sorry my fraction was off.

@nequam: I think those are a little different. But yes, some people wear them just to wear them.

Oh, but think of all the trees that die to make those little coin wrappers!

My favorite people are the ones who pump them full of quarters and dimes. Pennies I can understand, but they should just put it right next to the lottery scratch ticket machine for the folks who pump in $75 in quarters and leave 3 bucks worth in the return slot.

If they were really into recycling, they would handle Canadian coins. Those, for us non-Canadians anyway, seriously go to waste.

I cash in my change at my credit union, which runs it free of charge to customers and non-customers alike.

I love silly campaigns like this. They make me smile inside, because they are so stupid. You expect these to show up in satires, not it real life. I'm going to throw this idea out there now: the numbers they generate are based off some random table their marketing department threw together and have little (if anything) to do with reality.

I was excited, however, to see that Coinstar actually spelled "the" correctly on their website.

Does it really make a difference how many coins are sitting in jars in peoples' homes as opposed to how many are sitting in cash register drawers or in Coinstar's pockets? Somehow, I don't see the Treasury Department looking at this particular stat prior to deciding how many coins to mint. That could just be me though.

Just a note on this greenwashing stuff. I had a friend who worked for a consumer products type company, and they wanted to do this green thing with a paper based product they made.

Well, all they wanted to do was label it green. They didn't want to make the formulation green as that wouldn't meet their famous formula for the product, and they also didn't want to give any money to green causes as that would cut into their profits.

I'm not sure whatever came of that, but my friend was in the marketing department.

I recently used a Coinstar machine, there is no fee if you choose to accept payment as a gift card...so I did. My bank wanted me to roll my own coins and put my account number on each roll...it was just easier to get a gift card.

@timmaah: same here - it's an incentive to dig all those pennies out of the couch cushions. I wouldn't pay for the service, but it is free if you convert the money into a certificate for somewhere you were going to shop anyway.

Coinstar is nice because in a lot of areas there is no bank that has the machines.

In NYC it seemed like a lot of banks added those because of Commerce.

Now where I am at now I have not seen any banks with them, and like a poster said above, the banks around here will not deal with your change unless you wrap it and label it.

So, around here Coinstar is pretty much your best choice when you have a ton of change.

Coinstar has a point: one of the reasons the government has to keep producing new pennies is that they fall out of circulation almost as fast as they are produced because everyone saves them in jars. The real solution to this is not to take them to Coinstar: it's to remove the penny from circulation entirely. Unfortunately, the few times this has been proposed the "penny lobby" has effectively gotten it thrown out. Who is this powerful penny lobby, you ask? Well, one of the most prominent members is, you guessed it; Coinstar! Think about it-- if they penny were removed from circulation in favor of currency people actually used, a lot less change would be going in these machines. Meanwhile, the taxpayer is saddled with the continual cost of producing coins that no one wants.

@RandomHookup: Long ago, when I lived in Northern Ohio, then Maine, I used to have to deal with Canadian currency all the time. I would get it for change, or receive it from customers at my business.

People thought I was crazy for demanding US Currency, as if getting paid in my native currency were some sort of extravagance. For instance, the checkout cashier at the grocery store would say "oh, people will take that," as if that made it Ok that she was giving me something other than legal tender for change.

Related to that nearly daily frustration, I dreamed up this vending machine where you could insert all of your Canadian coins, then something useful, such as paperclips or rubberbands, would be dispensed. It had to be something so cheap that even pennies would net you something.

Then, once the machine had a decent amount of money in it, you could huff it back across the border and party it up Canadian Style.

Pennies and nickels are trash and should be dropped from the American monetary system. Recycling them is the best thing you can do. I don't care about the 8.9%, because the 8.9% cost is less than the cost of handling them otherwise.

To put it into perspective, if you earn federal minimum wage, a penny is only worth 5 seconds of your time. If you spend more than that amount of time handling it, then you have wasted your time.

I balk at Coinstar touting using their machines as environmentally friendly, but their business has a real impact on how much coinage needs to be minted.

I worked for Coinstar briefly in the mid-nineties, when they were expanding at a breakneck pace. An unintended effect of the Coinstar machines was the "mining" of the stash of pennies in change jars across the US. I forget the exact numbers, but it was significant--so significant in fact that the US Mint asked to meet with representatives of the company to learn more about their expansion plans and to get some hard figures on the number of pennies they were re-introducing into circulation.

It seems that they noticed that regional orders from banks for penny stock were decreasing dramatically, as the pennies that would normally sit for decades in a jar were being re-introduced into circulation on a large scale. By the late 90s, The US Mint was taking this factor into account when planning on the minting of new pennies.

I also agree that ~9% is an outrageous price to pay for coin counting. If you don't have a bank nearby that offers this as a free service, it may still be worth considering having the Coinstar Machine count your change. I know that they offer "free" coin counting if you take your funds in the form of an Amazon Gift Certificate code, and I think there is a similar deal for iTunes credit.

My kids have a great time using the CoinStar machine. It's kind of a treat for them. It's a lot more exciting than having to count and roll up the coins yourself. Rolling coins is fun for them for about the first 5 minutes. It's very hard for me to say this but in this one case I don't mind paying a service fee.

@QuiteSpunky: Also the Zinc producers, no doubt, since the Penny is almost entirely Zinc.

@ludwigk: You're probably right-- zinc is quite expensive now too. There's a nice New Yorker article all about the possibility of taking the penny out of circulation here: [tinyurl.com]

Dear Consumerist/Ben: How about a post about the Penny Lobby? It seems pretty hypocritical of Coinstar to on one hand be responsible for keeping the penny in circulation and on the other claiming they are "green" by making you use their machines.

Probably overposting here (Consumerist, please let me keep my vowels!), but here's a great excerpt from the New Yorker article:

"Coinstar charges most of its customers 8.9 per cent of any amount they feed into a machine. The fact that consumers happily pay this considerable fee suggests that they wouldn't be bothered by the vastly smaller penalty that rounding to the nearest nickel might entail. Of course, eliminating cents would also eliminate the middleman-in this case Coinstar, which annually processes about forty billion coins, more than half of which are pennies. Not surprisingly, therefore, Coinstar has been an advocate of preserving pennies. Since 1998, the company has conducted an annual currency poll, which always shows that Americans still love pennies and would prefer to continue getting rid of them by collecting them for months or years and then paying Coinstar to put them back into circulation, instead of getting rid of them once and for all by having the Mint stop making them." see link in my last post.

I hate pennies and coins and change of all sorts. I try not to carry any cash around if i can. Doesn't anyone else find the jingling in your pockets annoying? Anyway I'm going to go the nearest Coinstar and exchange the $10 in change I have been hording for some lottery tickets. Mega Millions is up to $81 Million!