Consumer Corner

I'm a coin collector. Not the kind that puts coins into little plastic jackets and raves about their near-uncirculated condition, but just a guy who doesn't spend his change. (Except when I lived in Germany, where a pocket full of coins could add up to some real money.) Shelby carries a full complement of coins zippered into the coin-purse section of her wallet and pays for purchases in exact change ("Wait! I've got change for that!"); I just keep accumulating the stuff on top of my dresser or desk.

I used to keep my coins inside of a giant plastic Coke bottle that Shelby made fun of as "too fratboy-ish"; now I keep them inside a drawer of the IKEA organizer by my desk ... until I can sneak the giant Coke bottle back into the house again.

Every once in a while, I'd take my haul off to one of those coin-counting machines at the supermarket, the little miser inside of me chiding me for just throwing away eight-point-whatever percent of my take for letting the machine do what I could have done myself. (Then I'd go home, look at the hourly rate on my paycheck, and remind that miser that my time is worth a little more now than it was when I was ten years old.)

So my heart was warmed to see that Coinstar is skipping its redemption fee if you choose to redeem your coins for such useful-to-us things as Amazon gift certificates or iTunes music cards. Just the kind of impulsive entertainment-related stuff that we would have spent our Kleingeld bonus on anyway!

Hope that this helps some of you other coin collectors out there ...