Spare change for tunes?

You know those CoinStar machines at your local grocery store…the stupid, big, green machines that charge you an 8.9% fee for counting your spare change, and then return to you a coupon which you can redeem for less money than you fed it? I’ve always felt that the concept of a machine charging me to count my own money was absolutely ludicrous and manipulating to the lazy and weak minded. I still feel that way.

On a very related note, Jen recently came across this blog entry about using the green machines to purchase iTunes gift cards. The catch is (in this case, catches are good, since the normal operating parameters of CoinStar machines are absurd) when you use your change to purchase an iTunes gift card, the machine won’t charge you the 8.9% fee. In other words, it just transfers your spare change directly into iTunes.

This afternoon James and I headed to our local Albertson’s (the only place in town where the CoinStars offer the iTunes option) and dumped about 30 lbs. of spare change into the machine. The machine counted:

1369 Pennies
349 Nickels
589 Dimes
70 Quarters

for a grand total of $107.54. It then printed out a receipt with an iTunes Redemption Code and simple instructions on how to redeem the money. We’ve already spent $20 of the spare change on tunes that we’ve had in our iTunes shopping cart for many, many months. In the past, we’ve always just purchased an iTunes gift card at Target to buy music (we don’t charge them…too dangerous), and now, we’ll be using CoinStar machines to turn our spare change into music.