Best way to offload zinkers? My ideas, and hopefully yours.

CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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This post will double as my introduction. Hello. I'm a copper penny hoarder. I have enough experiance to be able to potentially give something back to the community but not enough so as to be unable to benefit from the wisdom and advice of others :notworthy:

I built my own contraption years ago out of an old end table, a couple of socks, a red bull, a comparator, and a coin hopper out of a slot machine. It worked OKish. I was clearing jams constantly but it never the less was multiple times faster than hand sorting. I got out of the game for a while but now I'm back with a vengence with my new ryedale apprentice that I found almost new on craigslist. So now I am once again faced with the difficult task of offloading massive quantities of zinkers.

I have some ideas of my own but I have gradually found out over the years that not all of the best ideas come out of my head exclusively. Here are my ideas:

With amazon prime these days you can even get day to day items like laundry soap delivered to your door. I bought an amazon prime subscription so that I can use amazon for as many of the things that I need as possible. And I can turn zinkers into amzon credit at the coin star for 0 fee. So that takes care of a pretty good chunk but its still a significant bottle neck in my operation.

As for the rest, I need my pennies to go out into the hands of consumers rather than right back into the banking system where I will inevitably encounter them again. So I'm thinking I will do my pickups from banks and drop offs at grocery stores. So I need a good system of rolling that looks totally professional. Its going to be hard to get them to put up with my shenanigans as it is, there is no way in heck they will do it for long if im handing them sloppy hand rolled rolls. I need a good system of producing very professionally packaged packages.

I've been searching around these forums for a bit and I've seen people who talk about buying a rolling machine get laughed out of town. So my thinking is that i can pick up an old coin counter off of craigslist that will drop the pennies into shotgun roles. But I don't want to buy shotgun roles, that will kill my profit. I think I can fabricate my own shotgun roles using a 0.75 inch diameter "Cold Drawn Carbon Round", some coin wrapping paper, and a "Klopp Electric Coin Tube Crimper" or a "twist-n-crimp". Other than that im just going to save all my boxes and get some of that nice brown paper type tape they use and wrap everything back up so nicely they cant even tell it didn't come directly from a bank.

Well I suppose that's about long enough for one post. Looking forward to thoughts on my ideas as well as some of your own. Or if you want to sell me an automatic wrapper for 1000 dollars, that'll be good too :laughing7:
 

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mxh5891

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Feb 27, 2013
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Sounds like alot of work. I like tour coinstar idea. If you have a td bank by you or other bank that has a coin machine you should just use the coin machine at the bank. I know you want to keep them out of your supply. I think you will be fine dropping them off at a bank. Plus it will save you the cost of buying another rolling machine and making your own shotgun rolls.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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Sounds like alot of work.

As far as it being a lot of work. Yes. Yes it is. But its not so bad since I don't drive all around town looking for pennies. I just stop at banks that are along the route that I'm traveling anyway. And while I'm at home anyway, I'm just listening to podcasts and stuff so I may as well be making coin rolls while I'm doing it.

And really its weirdly fun? I don't understand myself why I like it. There is something about finding treasure in plain sight and that's what it feels like. Almost like alchemy except turning zink into copper rather than lead into gold.

you should just use the coin machine at the bank

Actually I tried that approach last time around. Those machines that they have at banks are very limited. They have little bags in there that the pennies drop into. If you try to bring any appreciable amount they will have to come out and change the bag again and again. It drives them crazy and isn't sustainable. They will tell you no faster than you think.
 

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mxh5891

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By all means if you enjoy it then do what makes you happy. I do plenty of things my wife thinks is rediculous. Doesn't stop me from doing them though.
 

Dozer D

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Feb 12, 2012
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I turned in a lot of my rolls to my local McDonalds (which I am a very steady customer, and they all know me), saves them ordering coins & and the coins are distributed throughout the visiting customers. Don't know about your volume situation, all you need is the paper rolls, and the time to roll.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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Ordered a "Twist-N-Crimp". I'll let you guys know how they work for me.
 

GA_Boy

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Take all your zinkers on vacation with you 5-6 States away and dump in Coinstar, Preferably in a no charge. My Bank doesn't charge me.
If you have an Acct. W/ a major bank just find one 5-6 states away OR ship them to a Friend/Relative to dispose of them free at his/her bank (you might include a present for them) .
That way you won't be getting your searched coins back.:laughing7:
 

Argentium

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Certainly a lot of those rolls that you drop at the grocery store are headed right back to your local banking system , so I think a better
strategy is to store the zincolns until you are ready to take an out of state road trip - even if it's once a year . The small amount of
money you are tying up with the one cent denomination is no doubt sustainable. What sort of volume are we talking about here ?
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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Take all your zinkers on vacation with you 5-6 States away and dump in Coinstar, Preferably in a no charge. My Bank doesn't charge me.
If you have an Acct. W/ a major bank just find one 5-6 states away OR ship them to a Friend/Relative to dispose of them free at his/her bank (you might include a present for them) .
That way you won't be getting your searched coins back.

Unfortunately shipping would be too expensive so that's not realistic. I definitely will dump them far away if I happen to be going far enough away, but for the moment it really is best for me to just put them in local coinstars and get pennies from local banks. I have to accept that this means im going to be getting a lot of my same coins back, but HOPEFULLY a lot of other pennies from other places will get mixed in too. For now I'm doing science. I'm keeping a detailed spreadsheet so I can get an idea if my percentages are dropping too much. If they are than I'll have to make a new plan and I think that plan will involve taking hell from the wife for spending 600 dollars on a crimping machine, rolling everything myself, and then casting those rolls as widely as I can to local businesses so they end up in the hands of consumers and not back in a bank and therefor back in my own.

Certainly a lot of those rolls that you drop at the grocery store are headed right back to your local banking system , so I think a better
strategy is to store the zincolns until you are ready to take an out of state road trip - even if it's once a year . The small amount of
money you are tying up with the one cent denomination is no doubt sustainable. What sort of volume are we talking about here ?

Local businesses often go to grocery stores to get change rolls if its closer than the bank. Those grocery stores get boxes from the bank every day to give out to customers. So they arent likely to take a box of pennies to the bank, they will simply instead pick up 1 fewer box than they would have otherwise on their next run to the bank. They actually see it as super helpful since this likely means that the lady behind the customer service desk has to lug around less weight in the future and those rolls almost all go back to customers in the form of change. Win, win, win. Win for me, win for the grocery store, win for the bank.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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*Update* I think I found a neat trick. I can turn my zinkers into coinstars for amazon credit, use my amazon credit to buy lots of gift cards, and if amazon doesnt have the gift card I need than I can purchase a gift card from amazon to a store that sells the gift card I need. Then I just use the gift card I got from amazon to purchase the gift card I need. Ill give an example. I buy shell gas, but amazon doesnt have shell gift card as an option, but they do have bestbuy and bestbuy sells shell gift cards. I turn my pennies into amazon credit at the coinstar, use the amazon credit to buy a bestbuy gift card, then use my bestbuy gift card to purchase a shell gift card.

Note that coinstar charges a 10% fee if you get a cash voucher but no fee if you take a gift card so that what this is all about.

I haven't actually tried it yet but I asked the lady at the customer service desk at lowes food if I could use a lowes food gift card to purchase a shell gift card and she said she didn't see any reason why not. So I'll report back to you guys when I do some more science.

Also on an unrelated note I'm thinking about starting a more general thread for more general discussion of copper penny hording and sorting.
 

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mxh5891

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No way that crimping machine is worth the $600 price tag. Better off just dumping zinc of essential back to your bank. It would take years to recoup your $ back
 

Dozer D

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Since you are into scientific measurements, why don't you mark about 500 each week with a different color nail polish, keep track of which color for that week, and then see if any come back and how long it took. I venture to say that you will see less than 1% come back even with a test of 500. I tried that about 2 years ago, and only saw a few, but months later.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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No way that crimping machine is worth the $600 price tag. Better off just dumping zinc of essential back to your bank. It would take years to recoup your $ back

The cost is only the difference between what you pay for it and what you are able to sell it back for used. A very conservative estimate is buy one used for 400 dollars http://www.ebay.com/itm/Klopp-CR1-Electric-Coin-Crimper-/201438882649?hash=item2ee6b16b59 and sell it back for 300 meaning a cost of 100 dollars. At-least I think that's a conservative estimate. And its entirely possable that I get 100% of my money back when i go to sell. Not that bad if i have to go down that route. But I think coinstar may be a long term sustainable solution if I can juggle gift certificates. Didn't get to test that idea yet today but probably tomorrow.
 

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jrf30

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zinkers

I've done quite a few boxes of pennies over the years. Haven't posted here for a while, but still probably one of the more experienced ones with pennies (cents. I know) I have found that even when I return them to the bank, there are SOOO many pennies out there that I don't seem to get the same ones back. I marked maybe 20,000 of them over a year. received FOUR back so far. All four still had solid marks, so I don't think the others rubbed off. But I don't see the same pennies back. I did see a LOT of the same halves back, but not pennies. I use a coin counting machine at a local bank that is free. So go ahead and return them to the bank. I think you are safe for the most part.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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Welp. I'm sad to report that I can't buy a gift card with a gift card on amazon. QQ.

But I can still convert as much to amazon credit as I can spend, and I know some people who use amazon all the time so I'm going to try to sell them gift receipts for face value. I know it'll work on my mom at least if no one else. :laughing7: Also the coinstars have gift cards to places I sometimes use. A few. Ill prob pick up an olive garden gift card. And I'll still roll some. Over all this is just going to be a bottleneck im going to have to live with. There is always going to be a bottle neck somewhere.
 

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CognitiveDissident

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I figured it out! I can sell my amazon credit for bitcoin on the internet and then use the bitcoin to buy gold and silver :D
 

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CognitiveDissident

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Sep 29, 2015
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I figured it out! I can sell my amazon credit for bitcoin on the internet and then use the bitcoin to buy gold and silver :D

This idea failed too :( Turns out gyft already sells amazon credit for bitcoins for 3% less than face. To compete with a legit company like that I have to go quite a bit lower than that. At that point I may as well just get a cash voucher at the coinstar.

I just need one of these

image_CR1.jpg


Anyone want to sell me one for a good price? :D
 

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