My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Change Is Not Good

A man’s front pants pocket is a one-way portal to his dresser top. Coins go in, but they are never pulled back out and spent. I have seen my husband, Ed, receive 97 cents in change, dump it all in his pocket and then pull a dollar bill out for the tip jar. This appears to be a near-universal male trait. We have all seen the news stories of elderly men buried under the rubble when the bedroom floor finally collapses under the weight of 55 years of pocket change.

The Bank of Ed resides in empty sauerkraut jars and assorted broken crockery that has found a second career in finance. “Coins are heavy, but at least they’re dry,” the mug with no handle will say to the chipped cereal bowl.

One year, for his birthday, I got Ed a noisy, battery-powered machine to roll his coins. Unfortunately, this particular machine used special rolls that you had to send away for. By the time your special rolls arrived in the mail, your wife and children would have long ago jammed the machine by feeding it buttons and subway tokens just to see what happened.

Most men’s coins are rolled by a noisy, irritation-powered machine called a wife. I spent the better part of a Thursday evening rolling two years’ worth of Ed’s coins the old-fashioned way. On Saturday we loaded up two canvas tote bags full of money and pushed our way through the bank’s front doors, like robbers in reverse. We began piling the rolls on the narrow shelf in front of the teller’s window, where the missing and nonfunctional ballpoint pens live. The teller stopped us. “You’ll need to write your name and full 16-digit bank account number on each of those rolls,” she said. I obviously looked like the kind of person who pads her coin rolls with buttons and subway tokens. Just to see what happens.

A sympathetic woman who had been in line behind us said that the Lucky supermarket nearby had an automatic change-counting machine. While we drove there, I gently probed Ed about his change-hoarding habits. Why couldn’t he spend the coins as he got them? He explained that he set them aside on purpose, so that at the end of the year, he’d have a couple hundred dollars to do something fun with.

“Like driving coins down to Lucky?”

“Something like that.”

On the pavement outside Lucky, a workman was unloading pallets of canned chicken broth. There were hundreds upon hundreds of cans, stacked as high as the workman’s head. It was what the top of Ed’s dresser would have looked like if stores gave you chicken broth instead of coins for change.

On the front of the Coinstar machine was a sticker informing us that an 8.9 percent “counting fee” would be subtracted from our total unless we chose to receive gift cards—for Amazon.com, Starbucks, iTunes, Eddie Bauer—instead of cash. I was surprised to see iTunes on there because I think of coin rolling and change exchanging as a pastime of the middle-aged and elderly. I picture young people just throwing their change away.

In case there was any question as to whether you’d count us among the young or the middle-aged and elderly, Ed chose Eddie Bauer.

We began pouring handfuls of coins into the basket. “Can we trust it?” I said. “How do we know it’s not skimming?”

Not that I would know anything about skimming. The five or six dollars a week that I take from Ed’s coin stash for bus fare and parking meters is not skimmed. It’s a “rolling fee.”

The machine tallied up 5,288 coins. We now own a slip of paper entitling us to $403 in Eddie Bauer store credit, which will spend its days atop Ed’s dresser, alongside the broken mugs and cereal bowls and pallets of chicken broth.