Coinstar is running a 2008 Holiday Promotion where you can turn $40 in loose change into $50 of Amazon.com gift certificates (or any gift certificate that they offer). Not a bad way to get rid of some change and pay for some holiday shopping. Selected fine print:
The $10 holiday bonus offer ends 12/07/08. Offer valid at participating Coinstar Centers in the U.S. only and excludes Puerto Rico. Consumer will receive a $10 gift card or eCertificate for the same brand that was originally cashed in for. Please expect 6-8 weeks for delivery. Offer good on qualified transactions made between November 7, 2008 and December 7, 2008. Transactions occurring before of after these dates are not eligible for this offer. Offer is only valid on coin transactions. Limit one per name or household.
Directions:
- Use the Coinstar machine locator to find one that dispenses eCertificates, as not all of them do.
- Cash in at least $40 in coins, and choose to convert to an Amazon.com gift certificate. There are no fees with eCertificates.
- At the bottom of your receipt, there will be directions for you to mail in the “rebate”.
- In 4-6 weeks, they will e-mail you a code for another $10 GC.
The especially industrious could combine this with buying $1 coins from the US Mint to get credit card points.
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This is a great promotion. Thanks for letting us know about all of these great deals.
Jonathan, what is the percentage that Coinstar takes off of your transaction? If you cash $40 of coins, you don’t get $40 back – do you know what the % cut Coinstar takes? This should be factored in as well.
The cynic in me says good luck…
Every time in my last 4 or 5 times I’ve been to a coinstar machine the eCertificate service has been down. I usually just take the 9% hit and get cash because 99% of the coins I take in are pennies.
Maybe I’m just unlucky, YMMV.
Considering there’s a limit of one per name or household, it seems like it’d be much easier to just get $40 worth of coins from your local bank than the US Mint, unless you happen to have a bunch of $1 coins from the Mint sitting around.
Does anyone know of a Texas bank that has a coin/change change counter? It seems that the banks are removing these from the branches.
Thanks!
Smith, the counting fee is 8.9 cents per dollar for CASH transactions only. Gift certificate transactions have NO FEE.
I did this the last time Coinstar had a promo like this. Got my rebate, no problem. I’ll be doing it again for sure.
Wow, talk about good timing – i literally was JUST about to cash in all my coins this week! I’ll have to see if the one i use has this feature, but sadly i’ll probably still use it either way….isn’t that bad?
one rebate per month is all i can handle 😉 but that’s one helluva rate of return for barely doing anything!
This offer had come sometime in January of this year and I had done that, but never got the extra 10$ GC for Amazon. I did follow up but to no avail. I just gave up after couple of calls, as it was not worth my time.
So beware.
Thanks
I’ve only used these Coinstar machines once, but I discovered that they are LOUD. You wouldn’t think it would be noticeable in a standard grocery store, but it was quite a racket. I did my get my Amazon GC though with no fee, so that was nice. I had to trek to another town to find a Coinstar that did the GC… many only do cash.
(Since then, my bank put in a counting machine that is fee-free for customers, so I use that instead.)