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Douglas_Knight comments on Against picking up pennies - Less Wrong
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A couple of people have mentioned vending machines not taking pennies. We can roughly conclude from this that the owners of vending machines do not think pennies worth their while. They have much greater economies of scale than individuals for "rolling pennies," but they don't do it. Tailsteak mentions rolling pennies, but he fails to compute its cost.
In general, large organizations are a fertile source of assessments of practices. They'll think of costs that I won't, though they may not care about costs I do. For example, office buildings use fluorescent lighting and cities LED traffic signals not to save electricity, but to save the labor of replacement. Therefore, I try to think about maintenance labor and ignore the cost of electricity and the bulb. Thus, fluorescent bulbs are better for overhead lights than for desk lamps.
I had assumed the cost would have been related to the volume of the coin storage in the machine relative to the associated stock.
Many banks will count them for you with a machine; you just hand them everything in a sack, so it doesn't have any significant cost.
Going to the bank is not costless, especially since they keep hours that are not at all useful for wide swaths of the normal working population.
I probably should have said "hypothesize" rather than "conclude." My memory from when I operated an (antique) vending machine was that it had plenty of wasted space. I certainly wouldn't want to introduce a machine accepting pennies into the existing world in which they are otherwise useless. But if storage is an issue for the machine, it's also an issue for people. I don't normally carry any change.
Another source of information is automated coin counters. I had one bank that offered the service for free to customers and another that charged a percentage. I've seen a free-standing one (a vending machine that takes pennies!) that charges 15%. So maybe Tailsteak should discount the number by 15%, but no more.