Remember that The Simpsons episode where Starbucks swallows every store in Springfield mall?
“… Bart, while walking through the Springfield Mall, passing several Starbucks, goes into a store called “In and Out Piercing”.
Employee: Can I help you?
Bart: I’d like to get my ear pierced.
Employee: Well, better make it quick, kiddo. In five minutes this place is
becoming a Starbucks.
Bart gets his ear pierced, and has a diamond-shaped clear stone inserted into the new hole. As he leaves the store, it, like all of the other stores above and around it, is transformed into Starbucks.”
New York City was one of the last markets that Starbucks entered, mostly because of high real estate costs. But besides Starbucks, there are two types of businesses that swallow an enormous portion of commercial space in NYC: drugstores and banks. Whenever you see a sizable store for rent, it’s almost inevitable that it will become a drugstore or a bank.
The drugstore business is not particularly profitable, but one chain, Duane Reade, seems to be opening store after store. In my neighborhood there are two Duane Reades one block from each other, and several other equally lame pharmacies. There’s an interesting article called The Mystery of Duane Reade which among other things, addresses a question just as interesting as “Who is John Galt.” Unlike Galt, Duane Reade is not really a person. The crummy drugstore chain derives it’s name from the first store that was located on the corner of Duane St. and Reade St. in Manhattan.
Banks are even worse real estate hogs, and are popping up even faster than Duane Reade and Starbucks. There are two stores that went out of business recently in my neighborhood, and both are being replaced by banks. There’s a bank across the street from where I live, and one or two on almost every block. Yet there are no supermarkets bigger than a tiny little Pioneer in a 20 block radius.
The stiff competition is forcing banks to offer new services to attract customers. Commerce Bank, for instance, offers a service called “Penny Arcade.” They basically have change-counting Coinstar machines without the fee. All you have to do is get the receipt from the machine, and the cashier will exchange it for paper money.
During the last major cleaning fit that I had, I took my overflowing coin bowl and dumped it into a canvas bag. I weighted it on my Health-o-Meter physician’s scale
Here’s what 29 1/2 lb of coins in a Strand bag look like:
I dragged the heavy money bag to the bank, and proceeded to empty it out, handful by handful into the Coinstar machine. I had to suffer loud and annoying cartoon voice aimed at kids and overall felt like a dork, but I got rid of all the change and cashed in my printed receipt. As I was curious of the how exact the coin count was, I asked the cashier for a copy of the receipt. She had to do it by hand for some reason, but here it is:
To calculate how much this should theoretically weight, I need to do a little bit of math. A dollar coin weights in at 8.100g, quarter at 5.670 g, dime at 2.268 g, nickel at 5.000 g and penny at 2.500 g (according to the US Mint)
This gives us: 5 * 8.100g + 358 * 5.670 g + 987 * 2.268 g + 659 * 5.000 g + 1928 * 2.500 g = 12.423876 kg
12.423876 kg = 27.3899581 lb.
That’s about 2.1 lb difference from my original weight. The machine rejected a Chinese coin, two Boston subway tokens and a few coins with gunk on them. The bag probably weights at most 1/2 lb. So it seems that the coin-counting automaton cheated me out of a pound of coins. That’s about 9 bucks by my calculations.
[Update] I’m told that pre-1982 pennies weight 3.1 grams instead of 2.5, so my calculation is a bit off.
Of course, my experiment is far from exact. It depends on the number of factors, such as the possibility of my scale being not as precise as I think or the possibility that coins lose some weight after being in circulation. But somehow I highly suspect that the Coinstar machines are undercounting. Wall Street Journal journalist ran an experiment with a remeasured amount of money. I can’t find the original article, but this quote about $87.26 seems to be floating around a lot:
“For consistency, we began with equal piles of $87.26 worth of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that we had gotten from a local bank in coin envelopes.
Talk about a tough economy. The machines at both Commerce Bank and Coinstar gave us less back than we put in — Commerce Bank missed by a whopping $7.02, while Coinstar was off by 57 cents.”
Where is Eliot Spitzer when you need him?
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A “rogue” (read “somewhat sloppy, but very interesting”) economist tries to answer tough questions, such as: What do schoolteachers and Sumo wrestlers have in common? How is Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? Where have all the criminals gone?
Commerce uses a machine that always undercounts. Every armored car uses a machine that counts correctly and it is not the Mach 9 that Commerce uses. You will not find that machine in any armored car in the United States. The attorney general should just audit the armored car that counts Commerce coin and they will see how every bag is over in coin. A lawyer should file a class action suit against them to get our money back. They are commiting fraud. Andy Roney from 60 minutes tested them and he was shorted money too.
jst an FYI, the penny arcade at commerce is cleaned and tested 3 times a day. we test it with a roll of each denomination. they must be accurate or it will be cleaned and retested till is does so. I highly doubt penny arcade shorted you that much…
That’s a very good point. I’m going to update the post – the weight of coinage apparently fluctuates greatly, and not just pennies either.
Pennies made before 1982 were 95% copper and weigh 3.1 grams instead of 2.5, so four of those pennies would weigh about as much as five post’82 cents.
Frakonmics is an awesome read!
Well, in fact, I recently calibrated the scale by checking the zero position. These things are pretty damn accurate – most probably within .25 lb.
They are most likely undercounting across the board – the missing pound or two of coins is consistent with WSJ guys experiment.
The question is – do they benefit from this? Maybe their packaging machines also use the “baker’s dozen” approach – it’s better to overfill the wrappers a little, so the banks and stores won’t complain.
You wrote: which is exact to within 1/4 lb
Your scale is precise to 1/4 lb (actually, since it has 1/4 lb divisions, you could say it’s even more precise. However, it may not be accurate. Unless you’ve had your scale calibrated recently, I wouldn’t argue over 1 or 2 pound differences. Here’s a link about Accuracy versus precision
Then again, maybe they are cheating you :-)
It shure diddly is.
Duane Reade is one corporate chain I avoid whenever possible. Ditto for CVS.
LaurelO (from LJ)
All the drugstores in my area are crappy in similar ways, even thought there are so many of them, so there’s no point in dicriminating. I wish we had some of those gigantic drugstores that suburbs have.
I love the Simpsons references.
One of my favourites is when the giant redwood tree is cruising through Springfield, taking out everything in site, when it happens upon the “KENTUCKY FRIED PANDA’ restaurant and wrecks it.
Homer: “No! It was finger ling-ling good!”
In most parts of downtown Toronto they have pretty good drug stores. My favourite chain would have to be “Shoppers Drug Mart”. Many 24 hour locations.
What we have a shortage of is ATM machines in some areas downtown. The homeless panhandle in the cubicles and sleep there to keep warm, so many of the banks have security companies come by and lock them up around 8 or 9 pm. Your only option is to try to find a bar or grocery store with one of those “private label” ATMs. There aren’t many of them and the service charges are much higher…