TD NORTH BANK CAN GO FUCK THEMSELVES

      I had an unpleasant experience at the bank the other day. TD North Bank (formerly Commerce Bank) has this coin counting machine called Penny Arcade using a cartoon mascot of the same name (who looks a bit disturbed in my opinion) which for both incarnations of this bank, offered to count up your loose change for free whether or not you're a customer. Not anymore they don't. I went in and found out that non-customers like me would now be assessed a 6% "counting fee" unless we opened an account with them. Seriously, what the fuck?!

I keep waiting for her eye to twitch

      I was always under the impression that we were doing banks a favor by bringing in change to them. That meant they didn't have to order so much for their customers meaning they're saving money when it comes to the expense of transporting those heavy, nearly valueless coins. (Remember, a quarter in the early 1960s was like $2 today and about $5 back in the 1920s. Now a quarter-dollar has the purchasing power a cent did back in the 1910s. Fuck you inflation.) I had to eat the fee the first time, but I will be opening a minimally sized account the next time I'm in.

      Now you might be wondering why it is I bring my coins there instead of my bank (which also has a coin-counting machine, free for its customers). There's two reasons. First, when I buy half dollars at my bank to search through, I take out the beat-up ones and the bicentennial ones (as well as the ones I want to keep) and give the rest out as change to my customers at work. I figure since people don't normally see half-dollars, I both don't want to risk a higher rate of rejection (currently about 2%) by giving out a shitty-looking one (this may be a false assumption but slot machines really do do a number on the coins) nor do I wish to convey that these coins were a one-year-only issue as may be implied by the bicentennial issue if it were received by someone who had never seen the coin before. Yes, that's my weirdness but the point is that I don't want to bring the half dollars I find unusable back to the bank I bought them from. Since I am actively seeking certain dates, I feel I would be hampering my ability to do so if I simply brought them back to my bank (after all, I might just get those same coins back next month). Therefore, I've been taking advantage of TD North's free coin counter to use that bank as a dumping ground for those unwanted coins.

      Second, the coin counter at my bank is slow taking a good twenty minutes to count out the over $150 in change I tend to bring in monthly. It also has trouble counting half dollars (sometimes the Penny Arcade was down when I'd come in): it can't quite get them into the proper slot for sorting. You hear them tumbling around and around until the machine finally jams up from their increasing weight. The Penny Arcade, however, practically swallows what I dump into it whole. It's fucking amazing how fast it counts!

      So now, even though I don't want to, I'll be forced to open a checking account with them for the aforementioned reasons. What it ultimately means is that I will have to cash more checks at work now to pay for my coin purchases rather than recycling the dollars like I have been all these years. I figure I'll just write checks to my primary account as the total increases in the account I don't want. It's an extra step and I'm really annoyed that I have to go through with this now. I'll adjust to the new routine, but seriously, fuck you TD North!