Coinstar now has a deal with Amazon and some other online commerce sites in which they will return a gift certificate to that site-- and here's the fun part -- without the 8.9% fee they charge for sorting.

Woo hoo! I'm taking my pennies in. I've never felt like I wanted to pay the fee, but I also don't want to sit around counting and rolling coins when I could be doing something more productive.

What's interesting is that if you wanted to go completely off the grid, you could use your Amazon gift card to set up an Amazon account and pay, without ever entering personally identifying information, AND coinstar will accept paper money and convert it to the Amazon card. So if you were on the run from the law, and you wanted to send someone a gift from Amazon and have it shipped to them, you could put your cash into a coinstar machine, get a gift certificate, set up an anonymous Amazon account, and make purchases.