I read this Snopes article about a coin collector in Manhattan who deliberately spent three relatively rare pennies, worth from about $200 to $1000, to spark more interest in coin collecting.
What I wonder is, given a set amount of time (say, a month), how likely is it that any of those coins have left Manhattan? New York City? The state? Should anyone outside of NYC be looking at their coins at all?
What about the ones that this same collector spent in the same area in 1999?
My guess is that coins would travel less than notes. You use coins for small stuff, and that tends to be local. If you travel, most of the money in your pocket will be in notes, and when you cash them at your destination, you’ll get coins local to that area as change.
On the other hand, coins last a whole lot longer than notes, so over their lifespan in circulation, they’d likely travel more.
I don’t know the answer other than to say I usually have enough change in my pocket to break a $10 and I travel around pretty frequently. I don’t tend to spend my coins any more when I travel than I do at home however but it does happen and even one event can put a coin far away from where it started.
One way to know the answer this question may be to look at the distribution of state quarters. I am not sure but it always seemed like they were released within their own region. Most of the coins we get here in New England are from the upper East coast but there are a fair number from the Southeast. I don’t see that many from the West Coast.
With an analysis that seems that easy, surely someone has done a study. It is like on of those plastic balls in ocean currents studies.
When the Euro was introduced, I could notice how quickly they travel. I think I got my first foreign coin (a german one) two days after euros began circulating, in the change handed to me at the small grocery across the street. I looked at it bewildered, wondered how it had managed to find its way there so quickly. Within days, I had already seen several German, Spanish and Belgian coins. I was very surprised.
On the other hand, it took a very long time before I noticed the first finnish one (I say noticed, because it’s not like I checked every coin). Maybe two years. So, there are limits.
For the record, I just checked, and I’ve currently more foreign €1 and €2 coins than french ones in my pocket (6 and 4 respectively). On the other hand, only 2 out of 12 of my smaller coins are foreign. I noticed long ago that the smallest the value of the coin, the less likely it is to have travelled far away.
I forgot : what I meant of course was that if the euro example can be applied, though coins seem to travel quickly, the penny might not go very far. Foreign 1 and 2 cents coins are very rare in my experience.
What an expensive publicity stunt! Dude has money to burn…
The first thing that came to my mind was the ancient Roman coins they keep digging up in South India, in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
I researched Arabic loanwords into English, and found that mancus meaning a golden coin, the very first word of Arabic origin used in the English language, dates back to the year 799, and is only found in Old English; it did not survive the Norman Conquest. Mancus is from Arabic manqûsh ‘engraved with a design, stamped with a die’. Samples from Old English:
ælcum messepreoste binnan Cent mancus goldes - ‘To every priest in Kent, a mancus of gold’.
loca, nu þu hafast þine mancossas, þa þe þu sohtest - ‘Look, now you have your mancuses that you sought’ - Latin original: Ecce habes solidos quos quaesisti.
bebohte his hors to twelf mancussum - ‘sold his horse for twelve mancuses’ - from Latin: equum suum duodecim aureis vendidit.
Cite: Mary S. Serjeantson, A History of Foreign Words in English (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), p. 213-214.
Maybe they have found Arab coins, maybe from the Umayyad Caliphate of Spain, maybe even ‘Abbasid, associated with archæology of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, I’m just guessing. King Offa of Mercia was known to make English coins with Arabic inscriptions alongside the title Offa Rex. How little the full impact of Islam on medieval Europe is acknowledged… Also notable about Offa’s coinage, here’s one for Uppity Women of the Middle Ages - “Offa’s queen, Cynethryth, was the first and only Anglo-Saxon queen ever named or portrayed on the coinage.” 
I save foreign coins and, despite never leaving the New Jersey/New York area, I have a boxful from all over the world.
I can beat that. Buying lunch on New Years Day in Dublin, I got a Greek Euro in my change. 
As a group, I would think that travelers tend to use coin operated vending machines more than folks not traveling. Just a wild assed guess, you understand, but I know that it is true for me. So much so that I keep five dollars in change in my car for that very reason.
If that is the case, I would find it easy to believe that coins travel much more than one might expect, given that even I, and fairly infreqent traveler have just returned from a three thousand mile trip, and had to replenish my car cash stash when I got back.
“Write a wise saying and your name will live forever.” ~ Anonymous ~
I’ve gotten Canadian pennies as change in South Texas.
Manhattan is a big tourist area. When going home from your travels, you don’t throw away your coins-- they go home with you. In today’s world, those coins could be anywhere within a day’s time. They could have flown across country in a tourist’s pocket, or they could have been dropped into a gutter outside the store which gave them as change.
I know I have change from all over the country. When Hubby and I travel by car, we toss the change we get at fast food places into the ashtray, and there it tends to stay, because we generally forget to fish it out when we’re paying for something. At home, we have overflowing bowls of change that we take from our pockets at night and toss on the dresser, to be scooped up and thrown into a bowl when I dust. One of these days, I’ll take it to one of those change machines, and who knows where it will go from there? Banks redistribute it as needed.
There is a website which tracks US dollar bills by serial number. I tried to enter the US dollars I got as change in Cambodia, but it would accept domestic information only.
Coins must be far more difficult to track. It would be interesting to design an experiment to trace their use, though. Put a unique URL on the coin and see where people type the URL from by tracing their IP?
When I still lived in the Boston area, I once received a South Korean 100 won coin in lieu of a quarter. Not a fair exchange, but unusual enough I didn’t complain.
Well, that could be because:
[ul]
[li]There are only four states on the west coast — and in general, fewer western states than eastern ones.[/li]
[li]In any case, most of the western state quarters are still pending. The coins are being issued by the states’ order of admission to the Union, and we’re just now up to Nevada (1864). Of the coast states in particular, only California and Oregon have been issued.[/li][/ul]
And there is no special distribution of the quarters by state or region. From here, the quarters are being minted and distributed in the usual way of all U.S. coins.
Being in Montana, coins introduced into circulation from the banks here are always from the Denver mint, rather than the Philadelphia one. So I just checked my wallet, to see how many coins I had of each mint-mark. I have a total of 85 coins in my wallet, of varying denominations. Of those, 71 are D, 8 are P, and 6 have no mint marking (which I think means they’re from Philadelphia also). The oldest coins in the sample are from the 60s; the newest are from 2006. Based on this sampling, I think it’s safe to say that American coins don’t travel cross-country very quickly or often.
For some coins, the answer is: Really, really, far.
Ah, but maybe you and your fellow Montanans hardly travel compared to others. This would be the famous Montana Anomaly — a local minimum in the Coin Motion vector field — which would be a much more famous phenomenon if it weren’t something I just made up a minute ago.
But remember, if it’s ever discovered, you heard it here first.
I once ended up in a truely random nowhere village in Honduras (got sick, yelled for the bus to stop and hopped out at the first place that had buildings). The local tienda had coins from around the world proudly displayed on their counter. My Uncle was able to contribue some currency from Hong Kong and some Indian Rupees to the cause. For such a random place (someplace where no toursts would ever go. I think half the town came out just to look at me as I threw up), they really did have a wide variety.
If you interest also extends to dollars, http://www.wheresgeorge.com/ is extremely facinating.
In 1981 I was traveling across Kansas to Colorado, and on the way found a Belgian 5-franc coin in my pocket, not knowing how it got there. This was not quite surreal enough to add to my collection of real life surreal stories.
It’s not at all unusual to get NZ silver coins in your change here- especially 10c and 20c piece.
NZ is a good 2,000kms from here, but it costs so little to travel between the two countries now that it’s not surprising to see plenty of NZ coinage in circulation.
Another few thousand kilometres west, and we get them here, too. And I get the odd English pound, because they look like one dollar coins. But we don’t get Indonesian rupiah, despite the proximity and substantial tourist trade to Bali, or for that matter, other Asian countries nor South Africa (and we have a far larger South African population than a New Zealand population over here).
No doubt one cause of cross-currency travel is the ability to look like a sample of another country’s coinage.