Ponder Post: Money, Money, Money

When the kids were little we went to a seal and sea otter show at Sea World. An amusing part was this cute little otter who repeatedly darted across the stage on his hind legs, stealing small items with a voice over proclaiming in a wee voice Money, Money, Money – I'll be Rich, Rich, Rich! That is the way I felt tonight.

This adorable sea otter proclaims that he will be rich, rich, rich!

First let me set the stage. Frank has been working very hard stripping wallpaper in the bedroom... bit... by bit... by little bit... by itty-bitty bit.

I asked Frank to smile for the camera. I think this is as big a grin as removing wallpaper merits.

Part of the bedroom redecorating also involves, what else, clutter reduction. There has been a fish bowl on the window ledge where Frank would dump his spare change periodically.

This fish bowl, complete with cloudy lined lime deposits from its fish home days
 had been repurposed to catch Frank's pocket change.

As a break from peeling paper, Frank suggested we go off this evening on an adventure to find a location where we can cash in the coins without paying a fee of 10% or so to do it. On the drive over I asked him how much money he though was in the fish bowl. He guessed $122. I had no idea but based on Frank's guess, which I thought was high, I guessed $85.  Our local grocery store had a Coinstar machine up front beyond the cash registers. As it turns out if you are willing to accept a gift card instead of cash, there is no fee and you get 100% of the worth of your coins.

Here is typical Coinstar machine. Note tray at left to feed in coins, horseshoe shaped output at center for receipt and trough below for rejected coins and other miscellaneous stuff.

I shop online at Amazon a lot and so we opted for an Amazon gift card. We dumped the coins into a tray at the left, used its red handle to tilt the tray, and fed the coins into a slot midline on the machine. The screen gave us progress messages, saying to wait while it caught up and displaying a running count of the number of dollars, half dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. We did get a warning message that some coins had been rejected and we should check for them in the trough below. We did. We found a few coins, and fed them back through the machine again, this time successfully. There were two items we did not feed through again – a washer and a sprinkler head part.

Not legal tender.

We collected our receipt for an Amazon gift card from the central horseshoe shaped output port. Both Frank and I had guessed low. There had been $143.27 in that fishbowl!

All that metal just for this slip of paper.
Pretty pricey piece of paper.

Before we could lose this small piece of paper we went directly home. I logged into my Amazon account, entered the gift card code and voila- there was a credit for $143.27 available for use and with no expiration date.

This is my proof from Amazon that the money really did go somewhere.

Isn't modern technology wonderful? Isn't the spirit of recycling great? In less than 15 minutes we converted half a scratched-up glass fishbowl's worth of heavy, dirty, metal coins into one slip of paper and two pieces of hardware. That slip of paper, with a few keystrokes and the help of a few zippy electrons became $143.27.

I can now spend that $143.27 on Amazon to replenish the clutter we just removed!