Hello Everyone!
Let's talk about one of my favorite things to collect: coins from foreign countries! While I have my fair share of USA currency collections started, my true passion lies in adding currency from new countries to my current assortment of world coins. The problem is that world coins are so hard to find here in the USA without paying lots of cash! The only foreign coins I would find in my pocket change and lying around the place are from Canada! I often thought about searching through large rolls of USA coins from the bank, praying that the sorting machines would accidentally let a non USA coin slip into the rolls! That is a lot of time and effort spent with very few coins in return! Thankfully I have found a rather easy and labor
free method that has allowed me to find coins from 6 different countries in the
two weeks since I restarted my foreign coin collecting! Thank heavens I accidentally discovered a much easier, and less labor intensive, method for acquiring foreign coins...make something else do the work!
The short story is that I work at a grocery store as a cashier, which means I often get bored and begin to watch what customers are doing. One particularly slow day I noticed a customer that came in with a literal bucket full of various coins. I so wanted to just stop him and search through that bucket on the spot! Instead I just watched him curiously to see what he was planning to do with his heavy load.
He walked up to this vending machine marked “Coinstar” (see picture below) and dumped the entire bucket right into the chute of the machine! I almost shed a tear, listening to all of those coins banging around into the machine as they were processed and sorted. After a minute or two of very loud noises, the machine beeped and printed a receipt, which the man took.
The short story is that I work at a grocery store as a cashier, which means I often get bored and begin to watch what customers are doing. One particularly slow day I noticed a customer that came in with a literal bucket full of various coins. I so wanted to just stop him and search through that bucket on the spot! Instead I just watched him curiously to see what he was planning to do with his heavy load.
He walked up to this vending machine marked “Coinstar” (see picture below) and dumped the entire bucket right into the chute of the machine! I almost shed a tear, listening to all of those coins banging around into the machine as they were processed and sorted. After a minute or two of very loud noises, the machine beeped and printed a receipt, which the man took.
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| Image taken from: www.topsmarkets.com |
Later when I was sent to break I approached the machine and found six coins and a washer just left lying on the counter-top! Apparently the machine can't scan foreign coins and spits them out for the customer to retrieve. I guess the man did not want them since he could not buy anything with them. I heard a little light-bulb click on in my brain and thought "here is a device that will sort through thousands of coins for me from different people and I won't have to do a thing". Since that day about a week ago it has become my daily ritual to check the machine during every break I get and after work! My favorite locations to check are the rejected item tray which is (B) in the picture and the nook located to the right of the counter-top, marked (A) in the picture. So far my efforts have yielded seven coins with future finds on the horizon!
Have a great day and good luck finding your own coins!
-Sean
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