Molbak's Green Machines Count Small Acts Of Charity

AT this moment, $67 million sits in dresser drawers and kitchen counter jars across Puget Sound. There's an average of $30 in every empty mayonnaise jar collecting pennies and dimes, and another scoopful of coins in pockets and purses. It's idle money for the most part, and for most people it's a bother to sort it and try to get a bank to cash it in for paper money.

Along came Jens Molbak to solve that problem with a machine that counts coins and issues a voucher for cash at the register. And now along comes Molbak again to add the loose change to the annals of philanthropy.

Giving is a hot topic right now. The region is full of new millionaires, or those aspiring to serious money. Charitable organizations are trying to understand the way the current generation of suddenly successful people will dispose of their contributions. One Eastside executive last week described the region as "similar to Pittsburgh in the 1890s, just as the millionaires of the industrial age were coming into money."

Molbak sees philanthropy from the other end, the accumulation of coins into a sizable chunk of change that could, if found, sorted and counted, add up to millions. This week, his Bellevue firm, Coinstar, will launch a campaign to encourage charitable donations through his coin-counting machines, which are on duty in nearly all the supermarkets in Puget Sound.

Molbak - of the Woodinville Molbak Nursery family - conceived and operates a company that places those green coin-sorting machines seen at front of supermarkets in some 22 states. Coinstar handles about 100 tons of coins a day.

It's one of those entrepreneurial tales that get written up in business schools. In Molbak's case, he was at Stanford Business getting an MBA when the idea occurred to him that the heavy jug of coins he had been toting around could be converted into folding money, but he needed a convenient way to do it. In 1993, the company was launched, a computer-operated coin-counting machine was created and he's in business. It sounds easier than it happened, but at Coinstar's offices near Factoria, the heavy weight of pocket change is obviously turning into lifeblood for a company.

Molbak, with new advice from Carol Lewis, former deputy mayor of Seattle under Charles Royer and former executive director of Pacific Northwest Ballet, has nearly 30 charities hooked up to his coin machines. The result is that starting this week, Northwest Harvest, the Eastside Domestic Violence Program and dozens of others will get direct donations from coin deposits.

Coinstar takes a cut, the same 7.5 percent cut it takes from all its coin-sorting machines. Here's how it works. Someone takes a jar of coins to a machine in a supermarket and when the money is counted, a voucher emerges good for a cash payout at the supermarket check-out, minus 7.5 percent.

Starting Wednesday, the donor can pile cash into the counting machine and electronically designate a recipient from one of the list of charities for a direct transfer. All recipients must declare their status as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization and register with Coinstar.

"The idea," Lewis said, "is to offer a broad spectrum of organizations rather than a smaller, selective list." So far, the organizations include Fred Hutch, the Corporate Council for the Arts, Bellevue Christian School, Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle and a long list of the most recognizable charities in the region.

Molbak holds up a plastic jug of coins and asks for a guess how much. I say maybe ten bucks; he nods. "Most people guess about a half or a third low," he says. There's more than $20 in the container, but it would easily sit around a desk at home over the months and years, not going anywhere.

For Molbak, the future of coins looks pretty solid. He sees no chance the penny will disappear, although there's been some talk of dropping the coin. "Too much a part of the daily currency," he says. Instead, while coins accumulate, it's harder to get rid of them in large amounts. Banks no longer will do the sorting. They want the coins rolled and counted, and some banks won't take them that way either, they don't trust the count.

Molbak remembers when the small savings and the small donation was common. He's only 34, but when he was going to high school in Bothell, he remembers Bothell State Bank encouraging a weekly savings of a few coins. People are still saving the loose change, he says, but it's sitting on a shelf somewhere.

For Jens Molbak, his personal march of dimes, nickels and pennies is just beginning. Every day, armored trucks are loading coins by the ton for him to recirculate to the banks. The light bulb of invention is deceptively simple. A guy who could have gone in the nursery business, who went off to Yale and Stanford, who grew up putting quarters into a Bothell State Bank envelope, has come up with a way for the Overlake Hospital Foundation and others to turn every milk and egg shopper into a philanthropist.

James Vesely's column focusing on Eastside issues appears Mondays on editorial pages of The Times.