Nerve Endings Firing Away

Techdirt reports that Amazon has teamed up with Coinstar, the company that puts up those green machines with hole-riddled trays for converting your spare change to cash. I recently unloaded my spare change collected over the last 2-3 years at the local supermarket. The way it works is that you deposit your change in the machine which does the counting for you, deducts a transactional cost of 8.9% (!), and prints out a coupon that you can redeem at the supermarket register. Now, after the Amazon partnership, the machine will let you print a code to use on Amazon for buying stuff. In return, you get the transactional cost of 8.9% waived. For a frequent Amazon shopper like me, that indeed is a blessing and I don’t have to cry foul about the high transactional cost.

Just to add, it can be quite delightful to convert your coins to cash. I had no idea I was hoarding so much money in coins and the sudden windfall (although no additional value was generated) gives you a kick. Heck, I also discovered some Euro coins that I may have got instead of nickels, dimes, quarters. Let some more vendors make coin errors and I can use a Coinstar machine in Europe too.