If youve ever walked into a supermarket within the past 10 years or so, youve probably seen a Coinstar change counter.
They are the devices that let you take a jar full of change, dump it all in there, get a receipt, then take that receipt up to a register and trade it in for some cold cash. So far so good, right? Well, now step in evil corporations.
According to Coinstar, they need to charge you a percentage of your cash just to be able to dump it into a machine. Last time I checked, it was free to do this in any casino in Las Vegas.
In my area, Coinstar charges you 8.5% of however much change you have. Thats not cool with me.
And apparently, it wasnt cool with other people either. It seems that Coinstar heard about the fact that they are evil, so they tried changing some things around. They now give the coin holder the option to either get cash with the percentage taken out the same way they have been, or they can choose to completely bypass that percentage commission and elect to instead receive a gift card. If you select a gift card, the machine will ask you where you want the gift card to be used at. You actually get some good choices here too. Places like iTunes online store, Amazon.com, Target, and many others.
The whole gift card idea made me have an entirely different opinion on the evil Coinstar company (Yes, I still think they are evil).
Recently I read about a way to totally confuse the Coinstar machine and pretty much combine the two methods of monetary trade. Basically what it lets you do, is get cash with no commission taken out!
YES! Best of both worlds right there.
Its a very simple way of doing it, but it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Heres the steps of getting your cash without paying the percentage for it.
1. Start the Coinstar machine.
2. Tell it you want to trade coins for a gift card.
3. Select a gift card. It doesnt matter what one, you wont be getting it anyways.
4. Give it your hard earned couch coins.
5. Discretely go around back and unplug the telephone wire :D
6. Wait a few minutes while it keeps trying to dial, then finally gives up.
7. Watch it give you a receipt to bring to the register and get cash.
What we effectively did here was disable all communication the machine has with its central servers. This makes it unable to put funds into a new gift card for you.
After it decides that the connection just wont work, it gives you the cash receipt. Since you never selected that you wanted cash, it never had a chance to ask you if you agreed to the condition that it charges you a percentage!
Without your consent, the machine cant take anything out of your money.
Now go cash in that receipt and buy some baseball cards..... or whatever it is you kids are spending your money on these days.
[Via Zedomax]
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