Spare Change? No, I mean a lot of spare change?

So in my preparations to be out of my current apartment, amongst the selling of my furniture to the craigslist monsters, while sorting, cleaning and donating I found one more creature I had to contend with. For as long as I can remember I’ve had a metal box that I’ve been throwing pennies into. I roll and spend my other loose change on a regular basis but pennies always just got tossed into this thin metal box. Well, the penny box has gotten to the point that it weighed about 50 pounds. I’m not kidding.

Since I’m stressed for time and not about to sit and roll 50 pounds worth of copper I decided to look for a machine I once saw at the local Safeway that counted the coins, took 10% and gave you a receipt that you could then collect your “real” money from the checkout person. What a great idea I thought. Soon after seeing those machines all those machines were suddenly gone. I’m not sure why.

In my lazy attempt to rid myself of the box of coinage I “offered” it to my friend to add to his young son’s piggy bank. He convinced me there must still be a machine out there somewhere. I googled “coin counting vancouver” and found another blog “Darren Barefoot” and deep in his archives was a discussion about this very topic. Although most of the posts were from years past two kind souls had topped up the comments with confirmations that there was still in fact, one machine left in the city.

So I lugged my square foot metal box stuffed full of copper goodness via a shoulder bag with handles to the truck drove to Commercial Drive and 1st Ave in Vancouver and found, waiting patiently in the bustle of the SuperValue grocery store the greatest invention to hit loose change EVER!

I pressed the button to start and lifted my brick of pennies and started pouring. After about 20 minutes of feeding this metal eating rock star my copper I was finally finished. Grand total. $85.42 dollars in pennies. After the 10% rock star fee I walked away $77 “actual dollars” richer.

Now I wouldn’t really justify the 10 percent commission to the gleaming, coin eating rock star if say you had a jar full of quarters as those are relative easy and worth the time to roll on your own, but for 50 pounds in pennies…it was worth every penny.