Grab those jars of coins sitting in the kitchen/bedroom/kid’s room and head to the Coinstar machine at the supermarket! It looks like Amazon is the most recent company to strike a deal with the coin gulping bandit, and this time the arrangement is doubly in the favor of you, dear consumer: according to CIO Insight, people submitting their coinage will be able to get an Amazon gift card for the full amount of money they fork over. Amazon sells the gift certificates to Coinstar at a discount, letting the company greedily fill its pockets cover its operating costs without taking their typical cut of 8.9 percent. After counting the change, the machines then use a modem to call a central server, report the amount and obtain a gift certificate number from Amazon, which gets printed on the receipt.
Yeah yeah, so in the end it’s all motivated by greed: Amazon wants to get a piece of the lucrative “spare change market,” which apparently amounts to some $10.5 billion in the US alone. Yowza. I guess I’m just not smart enough. I’d never pay someone to count my change for me, but apparently a lot of people do.