change

A while back I noted that I had worked at a grocery store that installed a CoinStar machine under the guise of serving customers better. Since the machine took a 7% cut of the change total, I always questioned the purpose of it. It wasn't like we turned down customers who opted to pay with coins, and at the least a bank would count and deposit coins free of charge for customers. Since the machine was providing a service that I felt the store should be providing anyway I was always a little bit cynical about that machine being used as a source of revenue. It seemed more a pointless extravagance in that situation, but I just today heard of a story that indicates that the grocery business may have changed since I was a cashier.

Apparently, a mother in Portland, Oregon, needed to buy some food for her kids but only had change. The information I have is that she had quarters, but perhaps there were smaller denomination coins there as well. The first grocery store she went to told her that they had a $5 limit on change-only purchases. The second grocery store tried to send her to their change counting machine (I don't know if it was specifically a CoinStar machine) that took a 10% cut of the money. When she pointed out that she could not afford to pay this fee and another customer offered to give her cash for the coins she had the store backed down.

This brings up a few points. First, the grocery store I worked for employed two types of people: high schoolers and the poor. Were the employees who enforced these rules all from the former category, because otherwise I would have expected them to be sympathetic to the woman's plight.

Second, apparently most chains do not have an official policy regarding how much you can pay in coins, but the stores themselves enforce these non-existent rules anyway. I am going to guess that the individual stores do not know that there is no actual policy on the matter because the chains want customers to feel the need to use their for-cost change counting machine.

Finally, this gives me pause since there has been a push over the last few years to accept the dollar coins. Why should anyone switch to using dollar coins if there is a chance cashiers may decide they are not going to accept them?