My young son has been collecting US commemorative state quarters for about a year now. It’s not at all serious, just a fun Sunday-night ritual to go thru pocket change with him and pick out the ones he’s missing. It took about six months of casual observation to collect 97 of the 100 types in circulation (all fifty states, Philadelphia and Denver mint-marks). But the last three–Florida P, Nebraska D, and New Mexico D–have proved to be extremely elusive; I even ransacked a huge plastic-bottle bank looking for just these quarters (est. it contained ~500 quarters) with no luck.
Just yesterday I came across a Florida P in change, so we’re down to two. But my question is, are these or any of the other commemorative quarters substantially rarer in circulation? Are certain types more common in some parts of the country than others (e.g. does the mint release such coins regionally)? I can chalk up New Mexico to being a recent issue, but Nebraska and Florida are real head scratchers. Then again perhaps it’s just dumb luck…
I was collecting the state quarters in a little pocket change dish on my dresser. I think my wife, not realizing what they were, grabbed a handful for the car wash a while back. So now I’ve got almost all of the ones from the last couple of years, but I’m missing quite a few from around 1999 and 2000 that seem to be hard to come by now.
Where do you live? I’ve had no problem finding Nebraska or New Mexico Ds. In California, we don’t get a lot of Ps, I pick them up when I go East for work.
Try fifty-six! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Quarter_Program says: “2009 will feature the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Northern Mariana Islands.” I’ve gotten the one from Puerto Rico in my change. (Looked it up to make sure it wasn’t fake; that’s how I found out they expanded the program.)
The territorial quarters from 2009 will be the smallest mintages. Doesn’t mean you can’t find them, but they will be in lesser quantities. Quite often when a person can’t find a certain state quarter, it only means that their local Federal Reserve Bank didn’t need quarters around then and didn’t order any new ones. So, they might not have gotten a few issues, making them scarcer in your region.
I had HI but seem to have misplaced it (not in my coin book). Still missing North Dakota. There was one state (dodn’t rememeber which) that I only collected several years after it was issued.
As time went on since the first year(s) of the quarters, the mint discovered that they were overproducing coins by orders of 2x-3x. The Federal Reserve Banks around the country were overwhelmed with the quantities sitting in their vaults. As more and more were produced, the situation only got worse, with many Federal Reserve Banks not needing new change, and consequently not ordering new quarters. The Mint, in the hurry to continue to oversupply the world with products that they didn’t need, but which put a profit in the balance sheet of the Mint, finally got the word and cut back. As if cutting back meant that ONLY 416,600,000 OK quarters represented a small number. :mad:
You may want to try City-Data (dot) Com in the forums section. They have people from all over and I’ve seen many threads where people will, sell, buy, trade or exchange state quartes. You can just start your own thread