Get rid of those pennies.

I found one fairly close on MacArthur, in a Lucky store.

I poured half of the pennies into the tray, and they immediately got stuck, doubling up as they tried to get through, like guppies crowding each other out while swimming downstream. So I had to get dirty.

After it was all done, I asked for a Starbucks card. The machine said sure! Then it said, it couldn’t do it, but would give me a cash voucher free of charge since they couldn’t produce the Starbucks card. Fine! I’d rather have cash anyway rather than suffer the 8.75 percent deduction for using the machine.

THEN, at a prompting by the robot, I noticed that several hundred pennies were rejected. So I started over again. Only 10 were left when I put them all through again, and then I put those through again as well. They all went through.

So at the end, I had two vouchers—over $20! Over 2,000 pennies disposed of! Woo hoo!

I have 3 containers of pennies taking up space on my living room counter. Ugh. I need to find a coin changer in a local store so that I can trade pennies for cash or a gift card.

The coin changer in the nearby Safeway has a sign on it that says, “Out of order.”

So I’m going to go on the Coinstar website and find out which stores their machines are in.

I love the internet.