It’s crazy that banks no longer cash your change for you. Well, to be fair Chase did but then they implemented a service fee on all their accounts so we closed ours and they don’t do it for non-customers. Bank of America offers the service, but get this, they take your change and then ship it somewhere to be counted. They promise to credit your account later for the value. Um, who the hell is opting to trust them with that because I sure as hell won’t!
Coinstar gives you the full value of your change if you get a gift card or e-certificate instead of cash. I had forgotten about this so we had amassed $85 in change until this weekend when we decided to just bite the bullet and use Coinstar thinking we’d have to give them a cut of our money. The Coinstar machine at Walmart only gives you iTunes credit or cash but the one at Jewel is full-service and includes gift cards.
Thanks to them I now have $20 in iTunes credit to buy apps (I had been surviving on $15 from Valentine’s Day or possibly my birthday), Joe has $25 for Starbucks, and the rest went toward Amazon.com because we get a lot of stuff there. In fact I’ll be using all of it shortly to order a recharging station for our Wii because I’m sick of it eating through batteries, even the rechargeable AA’s. I’m also ordering a Kindle for my step-daughter’s birthday. Let’s just hope she takes better care of it than her iPod Touch which could not be fixed. The place Joe called said not to even bother coming in because once they are water damaged they are $300 paper-weights. Fantastic. Perhaps if she’s lucky the iPhone 5 will be released soon and I’ll buy it because then she can have my 3GS. It only has 16 GB whereas her Touch had 32 GB but that’s what happens when you’re careless with your possessions. Lesson learned for her.