Buying a Commercial Coin Sorter

[Customx_12]

Has anyone considered doing this? I found some companies online that will sell you your own machine that is similar to Coinstar. You can set your own percentages to keep and if the machine takes silver, you will probably finds all kinds of good stuff every week. Apparently, you can rent a space somewhere (like a liquor store) and cut them in for a small percentage of the profits. Has anyone done this? If so, what kinds of things are you getting? If not, why not?

 

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[Customx_12]

Bump?

 

[kb4iqm]

Has anyone considered doing this? I found some companies online that will sell you your own machine that is similar to Coinstar. You can set your own percentages to keep and if the machine takes silver, you will probably finds all kinds of good stuff every week. Apparently, you can rent a space somewhere (like a liquor store) and cut them in for a small percentage of the profits. Has anyone done this? If so, what kinds of things are you getting? If not, why not?

Any machine that takes money and provides a product or service is legally a vending machine. Vending machines are regulated, so it's not going to be free money. Many local governments view vending machines as cash cows and some charge big money for the revenue service decals that you must buy for each machine. The fees became so heavy at one point that I couldn't turn a profit anymore, let alone have extra income to buy new machines or do proper maintenance on the ones still out there. That was the primary reason I gave up operating my vending business, sold off some of my machines, and put the rest in storage.

If you deal in any sort of money exchange you may also be required to be licensed/insured/bonded in some jurisdictions. I ran into that just operating change machines for the vending area.

Bob

 

[Generic_Lad]

Maintenance. Maintenance. Maintenance. Coin counters are really prone to breakdowns and malfunctions. First, it can't hold everything. Bags need changing, and it might happen at any time, 1 AM or 1 PM. Secondly, in many counters, wet coins will break the machine. While this isn't a problem for a lot of people, if you have people dumping quarters from a car wash... they will most likely be wet. Thirdly, not everything is coins. Most sorters do not take large dollars, and if someone drops an Ike in the machine, it will most likely become stuck and block the machine, to say nothing about all the other random things in coin counters, anything that people might have in their pockets may end up in the counter, screws, bolts, nuts, pieces of string, and even bullets are common sights in coin counters. And these can clog the machine.

They are very high maintenance machines, Coinstar is very well built in that it doesn't require maintenance very often, but most coin counters are fairly high maintenance.

 

[RON (PA)]

I often thought that it would be a good idea, but I would need to research it more. The high maintaince would be a big negative. The last time I checked, Coinstar charges 8.5 - 9.5%. I'm sure, with a little tweaking, this would be good business to at least try.

 

[Wickaboag]

bump.

I think about this every dang time I see a coin machine... anybody else?

 

[LooseChange]

I think that anyone who sells any product at swap meets, farmer markets, coin shows, etc should buy a sorter/counter on ebay and offer this "service" at their stand. You can get a decent commercial grade machine on ebay for a few hundred.

Offer Cash for Coins with an 8% fee (so you can state "cheaper than coinstar"). Charge no fee if they are buying your product with coins. The first couple of events won't be worth the effort, but people will remember that you have that and will bring their change bucket next time they come.

Last time I did a garage sale, I advertised that I would have a coin counter on site and that ppl should bring their change jar. I only had 3 people show up with change. I ended up with 40+ wheats and 3 IHs (no silver). I traded cash for coins with no fee and they bought some stuff with their cash but took most of it with them. I had a simple, low volume counter that I had bought at Sam's years ago. It was slow, but did the trick.

I also sold common CRH wheat cents for $4 per roll at that garage sale. I sold all 30 rolls the instant I "opened". There were multiple people that were there waiting for me to open 2 said they wanted all of the $4 wheat rolls. I didn't know who got there first so I sold each of them 15 rolls. I could have made them "bid" against each other, but I felt that I was overly fair in how I handled it.

I also think it could be a good "fund raiser" for youth sports, etc. You could trade cash for coins and suggest a recommended donation amount based on the count.

 

[TxAg]

Coinstars in my area charge 11.9% if you exchange coins for cash. There’s no fee if you exchange coins for gift cards.

 

[A2coins]

If you have the money to do it it sounds pretty cool