Findings from the Coinstar experiment

Well, I've made six trips to two different Coinstar machines and the results are finally in. My many years of coin hoarding resulted in Amazon gift certificates totaling $213.64. The breakdown was as follows:

• 22 quarters


• 962 dimes


• 938 nickels


• 6504 pennies

My key takeaways from this experiment are:

• This would have been a lot easier if I didn't have so many pennies


• Amazon makes it easy to redeem gift certificates and apply several gift certificates toward my Amazon account credit


• Not all Coinstar machines are created equal; one was faster than the other and one appeared to make several mistakes, counting some dimes as pennies and crediting me for quarters I never deposited.

My overall opinion of Coinstar: It works pretty well but I don't look forward to hauling mounds of pennies to a Coinstar machine again. In fact, I might just leave them out of the sidewalk for the bums with a sign "free pennies."