Metuchen Musings
Buckets and buckets of pennies

John Aden Lewis

Casinos — bright flashing lights, electronic beeps, and chances for a big payoff. Yet, as the old saying goes, "Never take more money to the casino than you can afford to lose."

I’ve learned this the hard way.

In an ideal world, a casino would be a place where you could take a bundle of money, have some fun playing with it, get excited about your gains, and be guaranteed not to lose a cent. In Metuchen, that casino already exists.

Commerce Bank’s Penny Arcade allows you to dump buckets and buckets of pennies into a highly interactive slot machine. The machine counts your money, has a little cartoon character that cheers you on, makes casino-like electronic beeping noises, and spits back to you all the lint, foreign coins, and paper clips that you’ve been meaning to separate from your penny collection.

It then gives you a paper receipt for your winnings that can be redeemed at the teller window for crispy dollar bills. It’s a guaranteed payoff. The money you win is your own. You also don’t have to be a Commerce Bank customer to enjoy this service.

Commerce Bank is really onto something here. I’ve tried several times over the past few years to bring my penny collection to my local bank for a conversion to greenbacks.

Approaching the teller window with a suitcase full of pennies, I would ask desperately, "Do you have a machine that could count these for me?"

"I’m sorry, Mr. Lewis," the friendly bank employee would say. "But you’ll need to roll those pennies yourself."

"But you’ll just undo them from their rolls and put them into a machine, won’t you?"

"I’m sorry, sir, but you have to roll them yourself."

After each defeat by the banking bureaucracy, I would go home with the best of intentions to roll several thousand pennies into packets of 100, but my clumsy fat fingers were never up to the task. So the pennies have piled up and up, a half-ton barrel of pennies staring at me, chanting, "Roll me, roll me." At last, the Commerce Bank Penny Arcade has shut these pennies up.

The Penny Arcade has changed my entire view on pennies. I used to see them as houseflies that swarmed around my real money — nickels, dimes and quarters.

The arcade is also a great place to take a child to teach them about the value of a penny. Indeed, the actual arcade is low enough to the ground so that even a small child is able throw their coins into the bucket.

As Ben Franklin’s 300th birthday is less than 500 days away, it’s a perfect way to teach your kids the timeless apho­rism from America’s most famous penny pincher: A penny saved is a penny earned.