I saw this about a month ago at my local Albertson's. I went through the entire coin-counting process (a very large jar of coins), only to find out at the end of the process that the gift card option was "not available at this time," and I had no choice but to pay the 9% fee for the cash-out. It sounded like the machine failed to connect with a central computer that issued the gift cards.

In addition to getting a new Starbucks gift card with the proceeds, it looked like you could actually add to an existing Starbucks gift card ... if it works at all, of course.