alt Hacker NewsAre these a thing outside the US?
For anyone who's not familiar: all over the place at tourist attractions and airports you can find mechanical presses that will squish a penny with an embossed image. You pick one of 4 images, put in your penny + a couple of quarters and then turn a big crank handle until your newly pressed penny comes out the other side. You'd then collect squished pennies in a little collector's folio/pouch/thing for later viewing.
I guess now that pennies are getting phased out they'll have to "upgrade" the machines to work with other coins...
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They do exist here in Germany as well, mostly in tourist destinations. The map does not show any outside the US, though. OpenStreetMap has 662 of them here.
For those who have not seen one in action:
I used a machine like that in Sweden or Norway once many years ago, but although it pretended to squish the coin you put into it I am almost completely sure that this particular machine was instead using a different piece of metal that was already flat and softer material than the metal in a real coin.
They have this sort of thing on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, but I think they take nickels now (since pennies haven't been minted since 2012).
I have seen them in Japan and many European countries, but I don't remember which ones :/
There was one in Strasbourg, France, by the cathedral
Destroying currency is crime in Australia, so no, this has never been a thing, here.
There's one at the Leeds armoury in the UK.
I saw one in El Salvador recently (they use US currency, including pennies).
Tower Bridge in London has several.
They have them in Canada, or at least they used to in 1983.
Many traditional machines where you put in 2-4 quarters and a real penny have been phased out for credit card readers now that just drop a penny from inside the machine. It does kind of ruin some of the charm.