After procrastinating far too long, I took in a bundle of change to the local Safeway and used one of those change counting machines to convert it back into useful currency. On the way in to the store I probably lost $2 or so, plus another $1+ from the house to the car. Anyway, after what seemed like an eternity (in reality only a few minutes) of noisy shaking and clanking, the machine spit out a receipt that read like this:
Change counted: $242.58. Counting fee: 8.27% Redeemable Value: $222.39
Now I’ll admit that it isn’t fun to take change and make it into dollars, but is a $20 fee on that conversion really necessary? I suppose I’ll never get the satisfaction of asking that question, since no one at Safeway has anything to do with that machine. I do get the satisfaction of knowing that I filled up the coin conversion machine so completely that it warned the next customer that it was full and could not take their change.
In the meantime it looks like I have some walking around money again.