I took the day off from work today, and among other things I gathered all my change from Matt’s place, came back to Jersey City and gathered all the change from the top of my dresser, and took it all to the local Coinstar machine. I took a wild stab and guessed (overly optimistically, I thought) that I had 30 bucks in change. When the machine was done counting everything, it turned out I had nearly 38 bucks in change. Thirty-eight dollars in change! After the 8.9% fee, my take was $34.69.

Coinstar is such a brilliant business idea. Who wants to count all their change, then take it to the bank and organize it into rolls of coins? The 8.9% fee isn’t bad when you realize that your change is going to sit around if you don’t do anything with it. So in a sense, you get “found money” for a small fee. I just got $34.69 in found money for the price of about $3.40. Not bad at all.