Do you look at your pennies?
How often do you get a wheat penny.
One of the guys at work collects them and so I check regularly. I got one today and I got to wondering how common they are.
Do you look at your pennies?
How often do you get a wheat penny.
One of the guys at work collects them and so I check regularly. I got one today and I got to wondering how common they are.
I work retail, see about 5 to 15 a month. Grab them up for a friend.
In change that I get, rarely.
I don’t look for them, but I notice one about every 12 to 18 months maybe.
They used to be a lot more common in exchange, I believe. When I was younger I used to go to the bank and get a couple of rolls of coins simply for the pleasure of looking for the ‘rare’ coins that I might find. On average, before 1983/4, I’d get one or two “wheaties” in a roll, and an indian head penny about every four or five rolls.
If you’re not familiar with it, though, in 1982, the US Mint changed the composition of the penny from being nominally copper all the way through to being a sandwich of a zinc center with a copper sheath around it. The new pennies are lighter, and cheaper to produce.
Because there is a weight difference it is possible to seperate the pennies mechanically, and people do just that. Every time copper gets sufficiently expensive, I believe that there are people who make money selling old-style copper pennies for the metal content. ETA: According to this Wiki article, the US Mint had legislation passed making melting down nickels and pennies a crime.
So, I’d be surprised at anyone getting as many ‘wheaties’ now as I used to do back in my salad days.
I hardly see them at all anymore. My husband looks at all of his change (he actually separates out the all-copper ones, too, although he does NOT melt them down!), and he comments when he finds one. The last time was probably 2-3 years ago.
Very rarely. In the last decade, maybe two. I get Canadian pennies much more often. I have never, never gotten an Indianhead.
Heh…
I do, and yes, I collect them. I have no idea why, I just like them. I haven’t gotten one for a long time, probably a few years now. Must be your coworker, he’s hoarding all of MY pennies!
Aren’t they all Copper? Or at least Metal?
Ain’t never seen one made from Wheat. Must be some newfangled coinage that I’ve never heard of before.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing money with breakfast cereal?
Ok, ok. I used to see them a lot more often than I currently do. It’s probably been a year or more.
Wheat pennies once or twice a year. Canadian pennies every couple of years.
Pennies collect in a coffee cup on the dresser and then dumped into a gallon jug when it gets full.
Same here. I don’t often do cashiering but when I do, I’ll usually get at least one, maybe two or three in an eight hour shift.
Coolest coin goes to the 1898 Indian Head penny I once found in my till. Coolest paper money was the $5 silver certificate
About 10 years ago I got 10,000 pennies ($100) and sorted them out. There were 9,995 Lincoln Memorials, 4 wheat backs and 1 coin from the Bahamas. 0.4%, I imagine it’s gone down since then.
Every now and then you’ll come across a handful of silver coins. Those were probably either dumped by someone desperate or they were dumped by someone who stole them from someone else’s coin collection.
Best I ever got was 3 Morgan silver dollars. I was getting some stuff from the bank and noticed what looked like some old Ike’s so I asked for them. The teller asked me if I was sure because they were silver. She said it sad like it was a bad thing but I said yes so she gave them to me for $1 a piece. My greatest coin collecting day.
I live in Canada and got several dozen wheat pennies out of the Tim Hortons till I worked at over the course of three months in 2004. I’ve only seen one since.
I also got an Indian Head out of that till, from 1871, and several silver quarters and dimes.
I’ve got several gallon jars of wheat pennies that my grandpa collected. They’re in the basement. I haven’t gone through them yet. I’ve also got a couple gallon jars of silver coins (quarters, nickels and dimes), and we have hundreds of silver dollars and silver half dollars. There are lots of silver certificates, too, in assorted denominations.
There are many other jars with assorted coins from other countries, all of them quite old.
I have no idea if they’re worth anything or not, and whenever I’ve looked up information about them, it just confused me. I’ll bet that the ‘coin shops’ would probably just try to screw me over and pay me very little for them, if they were worth more than face value, which some may be. I just don’t know where to take them.
Not that I’d cash them in, anyway.
I don’t have the heart to cash them in, as my grandpa just really enjoyed collecting them, and he collected them his whole life, so there are lots to go through.
Our daughter can do what she wants with them after I’m dead.
If you wanted to try to ‘cash in’ on such a hoard, or if you want your daughter to have some idea what she might be able to do with them, I’d suggest, first, attaching a note to the bottles, if you know the date it was filled, label it with that. Otherwise, note that they’re a legacy of your grandfather, and note the dates of his birth and death. Weigh each bottle or container.
Then use eBay or some similar auction service to sell them directly to collectors. You’re quite right that going in, with unsorted coins, will only get you minimal value for these things. Frankly, I’ll admit just reading about them, my old coin collecting habits have jumped up and I’m thinking I’d pay well, and pay for shipping to be able to go through just one of those penny jars.
I’d suggest leaving a note about possible disposal strategies for her to find with the collection, then. Since it doesn’t sound like they’re something you’ve talked to her about. Such a note won’t be orders, but may save her duplicating your own research, and the confusion you’ve had.
That’s a good idea, OtakuLoki, about leaving a note on the jars and letting our daughter know what I have found out about them, if I even bother to look into it.
Of course, my husband may do just that, as he will be going on vacation in a week or so, and he’s looking for something to do, and he mentioned that he might just look through some of the silver stuff during his time off. I may ask him to check out the old box that is down there, first.
I really don’t know anything about the coins (My grandpa was born in 1911, and he had been collecting coins from the mid '60s on, until he passed away in ‘89).
He was quite into collecting them, but not into it enough to ‘protect’ all of them in cases or whatnot.
There is a 1’x1’ wooden box that he had filled with coins (that he protected in it), and they’re just collecting dust, along with the ones in those damned jars…not to mention taking up space, but they’re sentimental to me, because my grandpa took so much time and effort to collect the damned things.
I SO wish I wasn’t a softy when it comes to that sentimental shit.
Our daughter knows that when I’m dead, she can keep 'em or sell 'em off.
It won’t matter to me anymore at that point.
nonacetone, if you’d like me to give you some more pointers, via email, I’d be glad to give you a quick run-down of what I think would be worth looking for. Also, I suspect if you know any coin collectors, they’d view the chance to simply look at the ‘protected’ collection in return for giving you a rough idea of what you have as a fair trade. (I know I would, if you were local to me.)
Again, just on a quick view of what you’ve told me - that the coin bottles come from approximately 1965 to no later than 1989, I’m sure you could find many private collectors who would enjoy the chance to look through them as a bit of personal pleasure. Between the change from silver in 1965 for quarters and dimes, and the change in the composition of the penny I mentioned up thread in 1982, I’m 100% sure that there are some coins in the bottles that would be regarded as a “find” by a collector going through the bottles. And given those dates (they’re very well known to collectors) you’d probably get good bidding on eBay for them.
As for the protected coins, they may be worth something, and they may not. Not everything that someone chooses to protect may be considered collectable by other collectors.
I’ve picked up 2 silver (pre-1965) quarters in the past few years-amazing that there are still a few floating around out there.
I find a wheat penny once or twice a year. Just last week my daughter found one on the ground. Don’t know why, but I religiously save every one I find. I have a small film cannister full of them, so that’s, what, three or four dozen in my adult life. I don’t think I’ve ever as much as seen a live Indian-head penny. Never got a buffalo nickel, either.
Best I’ve ever done is find a wartime steel penny among my wife’s change. I had the notion, developed sometime during an impressionable childhood, that they were incredibly rare and valuable, but alas…
Ditto. I used to keep every one I got(switching them for a penny of my own, of course), but after I ended up with rolls of the damn things, I started just keeping the really, really old ones. Same with bicentennial quarters, got so many I don’t even bother anymore. I got a 1941 dime the other day, which I kept.
I save pennies and sort them. I get a wheat maybe once every 2 years or so. Canadians are more common.
I once picked up a penny in a parking lot. It turned out to be a 1914-D, which is very rare.