It’s a savings plan of sorts. We put our pocket change into El Pico Coffee cans, those bright yellow and red containers that, when new, hold our brand of strong expresso coffee.

The cans fill up quickly placed as they are in strategic locations all over the apartment. Coins spill out of my husband’s black jeans when he throws them on the bedroom floor. I routinely pick them up and put them in the El Pico Jar on the dresser. And my purse, my pants, my jacket pockets are noisy with change from buying coffee, the Times, and all my other various and sundry Seventh Avenue purchases. Into the El Pico Coffee can they go.

We always need quarters for the washing machines in the basement. At five quarters a pop, for the washer and 4 quarters for the dryer, you can never have enough quarters around.
But the pennies, nickles and dimes: they really add up in those El Pico Coffee cans. So yesterday, my daughter and I packed the cans in a tote bag and took them over to the Key Food on Fifth Avenue to put them in their Coin Star machine.

The machine is rarely used and it works like a charm. It’s fun to pour the coins through the slot, though my fingers get quite dirty touching them. The machine automatically rejects foreign coins and any non-coin type objects like marbles, screws, and other detritus that finds its way into the El Pico cans.

We found coins from Russia, Germany, and Holland in the coin return slot and enjoyed watching the screen as it showed a breakdown of how much there was of each type of coin. When it was done, the machine printed out a receipt, which we cashed in at a nearby cashier.

$74 dollars was the total yesterday. Not bad. Pocket change really adds up. Now the El Pico cans are empty again, and it’s time to start saving so we can hurry back to the Key Food for the satisfaction of cashing them all in.