A penny saved is a penny spurned. That seems to be the thinking behind a new machine that turned up recently at a supermarket I patronize near my home in northern New Jersey.

It's called a Coinstar machine, and its function is to sort and count loose change.

Patrons with jars of quarters, dimes, nickels, cents and other miscellaneous coins dump the contents into this machine, which can count up to 600 coins a minute -- and within a matter of moments, it spits out a receipt which they can then redeem when they pay for their purchases on the checkout line.

Sounds like a real convenience, right?

The convenience comes at a cost, though: The monetary value stamped on the receipt reflects a handling fee of 7.5 percent. In other words, if the coins had a total face value of $100, their redemption value would be just $92.50. The rest would go to Coinstar Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., the company that produces this device.

Many people nowadays clearly don't mind paying for convenience. How else can one explain the phenomenal success of automated teller machines, whose usage remains high despite the imposition of onerous fees by many of the banks that maintain them.

Still, there's something distasteful -- even, dare I say, undemocratic -- about paying "interest" on money you've set aside for a rainy day. It flies in the face of Ben Franklin's sage advice, and seems to suggest that thrift is less a virtue than a vice.

The notion strikes me as especially repugnant from a numismatic standpoint, because hoards have been such important sources of worthwhile coins through the years.

I get this mental image of a grizzled LaVere Redfield hauling huge buckets of old silver dollars into a Nevada supermarket, dumping them into a Coinstar machine and leaving a few hours later with a handy receipt in his hands. Assuming that he had 100,000 cartwheels with him at the time, that receipt would entitle him to $92,500 worth of groceries -- face value less the handling charge for sorting and counting his treasures (which, as it turned out, sold for millions of dollars after his death).

That's an extreme example, to be sure. But even on a smaller scale, sugar bowls, milk bottles, piggy banks and mayonnaise jars have yielded many coins worth more than face value -- sometimes much more -- and I always view my own accumulations as possible sources of premium value for ME, not for some machine.

Naturally, this assumes that I will take the time to look through the coins and pick out the ones with added value. And given the relative shortage of worthwhile coins in pocket change these days, that might not be a cost- effective way to spend my time.

But interesting varieties can and do turn up on a fairly regular basis -- and now and then the search can be especially rewarding, as happened several years ago when hobbyists discovered doubled-die examples of 1995 Lincoln cents. Presumably, many thousands of those cents are still undetected in the very jars and bottles now being dumped down Coinstar's throat.

My perspective is colored, I'm sure, by the fact that I began collecting coins in earnest at a time when scarcer issues could still be found quite readily in everyday pocket change. In the early 1960s, I spent many pleasant hours examining coins from rolls I obtained at the bank.

My most valuable find was a 1914-D Lincoln cent in very good condition, worth about $35 at the time. However, I found dozens of semi-key coins worth several dollars apiece or more, including such scarce Lincolns as the 1924-D, 1926- S, 1922-D and 1931-D.

Even then, it might be argued, I could have put those hours to more profitable use -- possibly by working a second job. In retrospect, however, my coin searches gave me not only modest profit but also enormous pleasure.

It's sad that so few people seem to be pursuing that same kind of pleasure -- and yes, potential profit --anymore. It's also a major threat to our hobby's continued well-being.

Maybe that's why I dislike -- and resent -- the Coinstar machine so much. With 1,800 locations in 22 states at this writing, it's in a position to wipe out millions of hoards and with them the chance that their owners might move on from accumulating coins to collecting them.

Then again, perhaps it's just my basic animal instinct: