When Karen griped about Coinstar, I came clean: I love those guys. Without the chipper green Coinstar machine at my local Stop ‘N’ Shop, I never would have managed to keep my brain pickled with booze through pretending to earn a philosophy degree at a major ivy league school. Any service that allows me to empty the contents of my vacuum cleaner bag into a slot and walk away with cold, hard cash gets kudos from me.

Now I have another reason to listen to Coinstar. After Karen wrote us complaining that she was gypped out of $2.94, George White of Coinstar actually wrote us, asking for Karen’s email to apologize. As he explains:

Coinstar’s policy for this situation is to refund the customer the 8.9% fee they were charged. Our business was built on customer service and we certainly don’t want to charge a consumer for a service they don’t want.

If the consumer who has this problem goes to the store customer service desk, they contact us and we verify (electronically) that they did attempt to put their change on a gift card, and then offer the consumer a refund (some stores will pay the consumer on the spot, others have us send a check). The same applies if the consumer contacts us directly through our 1-800-928-CASH customer service line.

The vast majority of the time our machine is able to complete this type of transaction with the card partner, however a bad phone link can occasionally create this problem. We are soon executing a software revision to resolve the issue.

We’ve sent George Karen’s email address. Big props to Coinstar writing to us over three bucks. Make sure to let us know when you get it, Karen!

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