Say an American upends a Big Gulp of coins worth $25 into a kiosk at a Fiesta Mart in Houston. Each dumped coin flashes before a sensor that, in a fraction of a second, analyzes its metal content; this compositional analysis reveals its denomination, which the machine tallies before plinking it into a bin at the kiosk’s base. After every coin has plunked, Coinstar takes a service fee (say, 12.5 percent) and maybe a transaction fee (say, $0.59) to return something like $21.28 in (mostly) bills. Over the course of roughly 22 days, about 550 pounds of loose coins will plonk into the belly of the Fiesta Mart kiosk, at which point — once it is at least 90 percent full — the machine will alert dispatch: Time to harvest the coin crop.
From Fiesta Mart, the coins are trucked to a regional processing center, where they are divided by denomination. Most end up inside enormous white cubes, called ballistic bags, many of which are distributed into locked cages designated by bank. When a ballistic bag of pennies is deposited into a, say, Bank of America cage, Bank of America sends Coinstar an electronic deposit equal to the value of its mammoth coin cube. Now say a store in Katy, Texas, needs pennies. It can call its bank, say, Bank of America, to request a delivery. Bank of America calls them up from the cube and has them sausaged into 50-penny rolls and dropped off. Upon arrival at the store in Katy, the rolled pennies are dumped into a compartment of a register’s cash drawer, where they will remain piled until they are handed over as change in a cash transaction — whence, statistically speaking, they will most likely find their way into another cup, cup holder or other theoretically accessible (but, in practice, rarely accessed) location. Counting their initial trip in the Big Gulp, these pennies will have changed custody five times, and taken multiple car rides, to facilitate the absolute least important part of one transaction.
The pandemic annihilated this cycle. Erstwhile commuters had no reason to feed coins into parking meters, bus fare boxes and tollbooths; even when they did leave the house, millions of people, determined to spend as little time as possible in enclosed public spaces, stopped pausing on their errands to redeem their change at Coinstar machines. Coinstar deposits dropped by 60 percent at the start of the pandemic. As a result, banks, which rely on Coinstar to choreograph the nationwide coin-recirculation ballet, received 60 percent fewer coins than usual. Signs soon bloomed along the windows and checkout lanes of American businesses, prevailing upon customers to pay with either credit or debit cards, or exact change, because of a nationwide “coin shortage.” In fact, the country still had all the coins it needed for making change. The problem was that they were sitting in jars and pockets and cup holders. Pennies, in particular, were not returning to businesses. This is because Coinstar is practically the sole medium by which the pennies churned out with trochilidine vigor by the Mint migrate around the United States.
Coinstar’s Kelly green kiosks could already be found in most major American cities when its current chief executive, Kevin McColly, joined the company more than 20 years ago. McColly’s job, he said, was to figure out “how to get to Scranton, Pa.; how to get to Chattanooga, Tenn.; how to open Alaska.” Today, 92 percent of Americans live within five miles of one of some 18,000 Coinstar machines. The early genius of Coinstar was that it charged people a little for something they could get for free: their own money, counted. Dealing with coins was enough of a hassle that people were willing to pay a machine to do it on their behalf. So, it turned out, were banks. Myriad financial institutions that previously processed customers’ coins directly, gratis, now outsource that time-consuming task to Coinstar. (Except in Minnesota, which McColly described as “historically a bad state” for Coinstar; owing to their ferocious commitment to Midwestern friendliness, he said, a disproportionate number of Minnesotan bank locations still handle coins for free.)