A friend has a senior role in operations at one of the largest banks in the country and said they get more complaints about removing coin machines from their branches than about anything else. It turns out that most of the biggest banks – Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, PNC, Wells-Fargo, and Capital One – have all done away with them.

We found this out when we took my late father-in-law’s coffee cans full of coins in for counting recently. Our main bank – Huntington – took out their machines and referred us to the CoinStar machine in the local grocery store. They said the machines became a big liability issue because they were hard to keep properly calibrated and we’re always getting “gummed up” with button batteries and other foreign debris.

The CoinStar machine we used looked to be in fine order, but charges 11.9% of your total. It took us about 20 minutes to get them all fed into the machine and it came to a total of $222.22. I’ll admit we through in an extra dine and a few pennies to get it to that fun total. The actual, value was $252.80, so their fee added up to a tidy $30.58 for our job. That’s a nice fee for them, although I will guess we probably had the ‘High Score’ that day for the number of coffee cans we brought in.

This was my first experience with paying for coins to be counted and I’m hoping it’s my last. I generally keep my coin inventory pretty thin. Even at the regular poker night my old high school buddies & I have, they know that I constantly manage nickels and dimes out of my bankroll. If I have a weak hand, I’ll always bet 5 nickels before giving up a quarter.

That will be especially true now that free coin counting is gone from banks. Has your bank gotten rid of this service?

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