No this isn't some magic trick :). While reading some other blog posts I saw on that talked about cashing in your spare change in a
CoinStar machine and then using the money for some purpose besides sitting in a jar or shoebox or piggy bank. I have used a CoinStar machine in the past and knew how they worked. For those of you that may not know about them these machines are located in stores and will automatically count your change once counted it would print out a voucher which you'd take to customer service and get your cash. Of course Coinstar takes their cut, 9.8% before printing out your voucher. I'm not sure when it started but you can now get a gift certificate from several stores such as Amazon, Lowe's, or for pizza from Papa John's. The cool thing is when you get a certificate from one of these stores CoinStar does not deduct it's 9.8% fee. I'm certain these vendors provide CoinStar some sort of kickback for being on the machine but that's okay with me. We had been collecting change for quite some time so after reading about being able to get a gift certificate and knowing we wanted to put up a ceiling fan in the living room we decided to use the change to help fund the ceiling fan purchase.
Here's most of our coins loaded into the CoinStar machine before it started counting. We had a separate bag with pennies that we had yet to add to the hopper. Four times the machine paused and displayed a message on screen stating "Wow you have a lot of coins. Please give us a minute to catch up." Or something close to that. We keep feeding and feeding until finally it had accepted all of our coins.
Our receipt. As you can we had a bunch of coins and came away with a Lowe's gift certificate for $121.52.
Here's the ceiling fan we bought. While it cost a little bit more than $121.52 our spare change paid for the vast majority of the purchase.
