Why does society make us feel guilty for taking coins to the bank??

nzseries1

Live in London? Feed all your coins into the oyster card machine.
Use them in tesco at the self checkout like others have stated.
Got a vending machine at work? Put them in there.
Buy your weekly lotto ticket with the coins as you know exactly in advance how much it'll be.
Go with your kids down to South Bank / London Eye and give the shrapnel to the street performers.
http://blog.g2-tech.co.uk/2009/12/what-to-do-with-a-large-pile-of-coins/
All better than queueing at the bank!

lilmofie84

nzseries1 wrote: »

Live in London? Feed all your coins into the oyster card machine.
Use them in tesco at the self checkout like others have stated.
Got a vending machine at work? Put them in there.
Buy your weekly lotto ticket with the coins as you know exactly in advance how much it'll be.
Go with your kids down to South Bank / London Eye and give the shrapnel to the street performers.
http://blog.g2-tech.co.uk/2009/12/what-to-do-with-a-large-pile-of-coins/
All better than queueing at the bank!

Or chuck in a money jar and save, save, save Which is kinda the whole point of this site :P

hermante

nzseries1 wrote: »

Live in London? Feed all your coins into the oyster card machine.

Only problem is that it doesn't accept anything lower than 10p. So I still have all the useless coins. (Though occasionally you can find a 5p in the coin return box.) And the money stays unused on my oyster until I travel out of my annual zones.

Also, i've found the oyster coin machine to be much stricter on coins than supermarket self-checkouts. Sometimes it rejects a coin it has spit out itself! So its Sainsbury's and ASDA for me.

Holders of credit cards that pay rewards (cashback, airmiles, points etc) are ordering huge numbers of $1 coins from the US Mint at face value with no delivery charge...They receive the rewards from their credit card without really "spending" any money. Of course, this would never happen in the UK because we got rid of £1 notes long ago in 1984,

A bit too late for that - the US mint caught on a few months ago and now cash advance fees are charged. And BOE got rid of £1 notes, but don't they still exist in Scotland and NI?

nzseries1

hermante wrote: »

Only problem is that it doesn't accept anything lower than 10p. So I still have all the useless coins.

Yeah that is true.

Years ago I used to buy stamps with the 1ps, 2ps and 5ps because the Post Office vending machines used to accept them. But their new fandangled machines don't accept them any more! At least Tesco self-checkout still takes them.

Oregon

Off to tesco I go in future then!!! Wonder how long it takes to feed a self serv with enough for a weekly shop lol

pqrdef

In the last 20 years the only reason I've ever been to a bank branch and queued at a till is to pay in bags of coins. What other reason is there?

But we do have too many coins. A 2p is worth less than the farthing was when it was abolished. We could get rid of coppers and they wouldn't be missed.


As for manning the tills, it's all a bit like school dinner ladies having lunch breaks during the lunch hour. Most service industries have got used to the idea that it's no use working when the customers are working, they have to organise themselves to be at maximum capacity when the customers are free. How about *no* staff having lunch breaks between 12 and 1.30?

The lunch-break trade is the main reason why banks cling to their High Street sites. Other customers would prefer them to relocate somewhere with better parking. But if that's how the banks want to play it, they'd better decide that the branch day revolves around lunchtime. Lunchtime isn't just an inconvenience when the customers make a nuisance of themselves, it's what they're there for.

Outfits like Pret a Manger can show how it's done. For instance, morning and afternoon shifts that overlap between 11.30 and 2.30. And everybody out front at lunchtime including the manager and the financial adviser. What sort of service operation is it that makes customers feel like it's their fault for wanting to use the bank when the bank is busy?

opinions4u

How about *no* staff having lunch breaks between 12 and 1.30?

Depending on the nature of the branch, that's not uncommon in a bank.

JuicyJesus

pqrdef wrote: »

The lunch-break trade is the main reason why banks cling to their High Street sites. Other customers would prefer them to relocate somewhere with better parking

Are you sure? The businesses on the high streets who need change, to make deposits etc - and who actually pay for their banking and so generate profit for the banks - respectfully disagree.

timrollpickering

lilmofie84 wrote: »

Since when can you deposit coins via the deposit point envelopes?

You used to be able to do so with HSBC/Midland. When I opened my first account with them in the early 1990s a lot of their branches had deposit point machines - you filled up an envelope with any mixture of coins, notes, Scottish/NI notes, cheques, postal orders etc, added a paying in slip and took it to the machine where you deposited it and got a receipt. They subsequently added card readers, but you just had to feed in your card, and with no need for a PIN it was possible to have someone else deposit on your behalf.

To add to the usefulness a lot of Midland branches had 24 hour access lobbies so you could get in to deposit out of hours (I seem to recall they were one of the earliest UK banks to roll them out, at least in small towns and suburbs). They also repeatedly told me that if I couldn't get a envelope into a machine, either because it wouldn't accept my card (this was a problem for a while at my then local branch despite the cash & statement machines not having any trouble) or because the lobby door wasn't working or because the branch didn't have one then it was okay (albeit my own risk) to deposit via the bank's external letterbox.

However in the last several years HSBC have changed many of their branches and not always for the better. Roughly simultaneously they started withdrawing the lobby service, some refurbishing it out, other doing little more than just locking the door completely overnight, and replaced the old deposit point machines with separate Cheque and "Cash" (actually just notes) deposit machines, features not available on the externally accessible machines. Their coin machines are much much rarer. And even letterboxes are being sealed up, making it extremely hard to deposit when the branch is shut.

I used to make out of hours deposits via the letterbox at a small suburban branch nearby but about a year ago I got a snotty phonecall to tell me that that box is for post not deposits, and offering no advice whatsoever about how to deposit out of hours. The branch in question doesn't open on Saturdays.

(Fortunately there's since been a new branch in the new shopping centre which has longer hours, Saturday opening and a coin machine.)

molit

not sure if this has been mentioened already in the thread, but some natwest banks have the coin countintg machines, and they seem to be very effective