Coins Counting

In the effort to minimize spending, I like breaking bills into coins and store the coins up in "savings" jars. It helps me stop spending, since I feel like I've been using up all my cash (when in fact I haven't).

So after collecting coins for a year, I have jars full of pennies, quarters, toonies, loonies, and probably some buttons and foreign countries' coins. It is time to trade them into cash. So off to the bank we went.

Imagine our surprise when the teller told us that we need to roll them all up nicely (manually) before trading them in. They don't have coin-counting machines in any of the branches (even in the head office). This was ridiculous. Even back in a third world country such as mine, all banks have the coin-counting machine. This is Canada! Besides, if we had them all rolled up nicely, we wouldn't need to trade them in.

So, off to Google we researched. And yup, everyone apparently had the same problem. And the only place that would trade your coins into bills are casino. Yes, that's right. Casino! We called around and found that a nearby casino stopped offering that service recently. Another call to River Rock Casino confirmed that they still provided this coins-to-bills service.

We haven't gone there yet, but does anyone know who else provides this kind of service? Banks, where every money-related transactions should occur, do not have it. And we live quite far away from River Rock Casino.