sifting

[totient]

Sifting through 2500 of roozle's coins the other day, I found one silver dime, two wheat cents, and no bicentennial quarters. I'm not surprised that the wheat cents are getting less common (any pre-83 penny is worth a little more than 3c for the copper in it, and machines can easily tell them apart by the weight). I'm a little surprised, though, at how quickly 1976 quarters have disappeared from circulation, and even more surprised that my rate of finding silver in circulation is going up over time, even though silver coinage is now worth over 20 times face value. Is it just me?

Comments

[jered]

Did you do this through manual inspection, or do you have some form of automation?

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Manual inspection, while sorting the coins into pennies and nickels to let Coinstar turn in to Amazon credit, and everything else to roll myself. Sifting copper vs zinc pennies is too fussy to be worth the $5 or so expected return, but wheat cents and silver don't require peering at the date.

[jered]

Hmm, does one identify them? I have a cheap but effective coin sorter/counter, but I do have to do a quick manual inspection along the edge for stray euro, T tokens and dollars.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

Silver coins sound and feel different, are generally more worn due to the softer metal, tarnish differently, and finally can be picked out of a stack during rolling by the lack of copper on the edge. Wheat cents require looking at the back, but you can generally not bother checking anything that's at all shiny, since they haven't been minted in 50+ years.

Copper pennies weigh a little bit more than zinc, and I would not be at all surprised if Coinstar machines were sorting them to sit on or possibly even sell for their "numismatic" (that is, melt) value.

[whc.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall that its now illegal to melt pennies for their scrap value, so I doubt coinstar is doing that.

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

No, I don't imagine they're melting the pennies, but I could easily imagine that they're sitting on a warehouse full of them and/or selling them in quantity to people who think they're a good investment. And maybe they even are a good investment.