Another 3,000,000,000 quarters this year.
cladking
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The mint is on track to make another nearly 3 billion quarters this year.
Ho Hum.
While this is higher than has been normal for the last twenty years it is no record. It's higher than the '65 quarter which is becoming difficult to find in circulation and that is always worn out and usually cull when it is found. These early quarters had huge mintages but most have been lost or destroyed over the decades and the survivors are usually in pitiful condition. They were designed to last only 30 years and we are fast approaching double that.
What is remarkable about a mintage of 3 billion is the dramatic effect it will have on the incidence of the low mintage early quarters. There are only about 35 million 1968-D's surviving so after this year everyone who wants one from circulation will have to look through another "90" quarters to find one! These are already very difficult to find and every year there are fewer surviving and lots of new coins to make them even fewer and further between.
The FED has been removing culls that are light or distorted meaning many heavily worn '68-D's are getting destroyed but if they begin removing coins with corrosion and other severe problems the population of these early dates will plummet and new coins will be made to replace them. It would be easy to remove coins with heavily worn edges as well.
Couple these destructive forces of attrition with a growing drawdown by collectors and better date and then all older date eagle reverse quarters could quickly become a thing of the past. Even the later date eagle coins are now getting a little tough to find in nice XF.
It might be mentioned even more dimes will be made and with the much higher attrition on dimes the scarcer dates all already exceedingly difficult to find though nice VG coins are not unusual if you can find one at all. There are fewer '69 dimes than '68-D quarters.
All of the coins due to attrition and wear are getting very tough to find in nice attractive F or better condition and this goes several times over for clads. You can go through an entire roll of pennies and see nothing but culls and tarnish. While most of these have been saved in significant quantities it's hardly unusual that every coin in every roll is skunked. Many dates of BU rolls are simply atrocious with no more than a few that are pristine and even pristine coins can be poorly made eyesores.
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3 billion clad quarters at .2 ounce each is 37,500,000 pounds or 18750 short tons. At 44,000 pounds to a truckload it would take 852 semis to move them.
Just how does the Fed remove damaged, filthy, or heavily worn coins from circulation? Do they have giant Coinstar machines they run the coins through?
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Yes, but it is not the Fed, it is the distribution armoured car companies. They however (a friend owned one) only do damaged coins from banks, not coinstar. He also had sorting machines, built to pull out silver. Coinstar will not take an severely underweight coin, or a damaged coin from what I gathered.
For years, I have been pulling my 1965 through early 1970s quarters and dimes from circulation, and throwing them in a jar. I also add old nickels and common wheat cents to the jar. I have a couple jars that are full. I know they are only worth face value, but I hoard them anyway.
Here is my current jar:
We really needed these Magician (2 headed) coins.
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And they say no one is using cash anymore. Someone is. If there were no CC’s the mint would be making trillions not billions.
Martin
That's about 9 new quarters per person, or close to a roll per family of four. Add the quarters already in circulation and that becomes several rolls per family. Add the cents, nickels and dimes and it becomes a small hoard for each family, even after allowing for attrition.
Where are all these coins being kept? Not everyone dumps their spare change into a jar, and some people rarely use coins at all. They are all winding up someplace, but where?
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The machines that do this are "home made". There simply isn't enough demand to build machines to separate silver, defective, or heavily worn coin so each user build their own. I believe they all work on very simple principles. I believe most of the silver separators used to work on the difference in rotational inertia.
Worn coins are most probably pulled out by their ability to pass through smaller openings. Being thinner they can be sieved. I've collected the most heavily worn quarters by date since 1997 or so. I have some very thin coins in my collection. Curiously I have added not a single new coin to the collection since 2008. Before this I was able to "upgrade" three or four coins per year but no longer. It is on this basis I believe they are removing worn coins. i'm also seeing fewer bent, holed, and distorted coins. There's still garbage in circulation but now days most of the culls are corroded or gouged. They're still round, flat, and not heavily worn. Most are still full weight or nearly full weight.
Taking all the bad pennies out of circulation wouldn't leave much but most of the old quarters are cull VG's. One rarely sees anything over a nice F any longer and some dates are not only long in the tooth but rarely seen at all.
Good question.
The coins are in the pipeline for the main part. There was a time when coins passed very quickly through this pipeline. Silver coins moved so rapidly and the metal so soft that they could get down to AG in as little as 30 years. Now the coins move slowly and the metal so hard that if a quarter didn't get lost or destroyed it could last as long as 80 years or so0 before getting to AG. But most are lost or suffer "fatal injuries" ie-they become culls after a short time. Even though the Fed is removing thin coin this is a low percentage of what they are destroying. Sixty years and only about 5% of '65 quarters were deemed to thin for use.
Coins aren't worth much any longer in an age of trillion dollar budgets and billion dollar bailouts so they are allowed to accumulate in drawers, jars, and cash registers.
Of course much of production is really just to replace coins that have been lost so I really shouldn't say you need to look through an "extra" 90 coins for a scarcer date. It's more true to say that you have to look through an extra 90 "new" coins and that many of those old coins you'd have otherwise searched are gone now.
My friend pulled all the copper pennies, he had $1M face of them and wanted to start a copper ETF on the hoard. He sold the company 10 years ago and I lost touch. I miss that connection. I use to have access to straight from the mint ballistic bags of everything. There is a reason I have such nice coins in my 2002 and 2006 mint sets.
He was unhappy about the silver sorter since it was not paying for itself.
My lord he had jars of error coins up the wazoo.
Clad - the fed never sees a coin again once they are shipped out. It is all the distributors and the accounting is done most by weight, volume and counters. If you walked into one there are coins strewn about. My friend said it is not worth it to sweep every day it cost more than the coins were worth. he also did the currency but I was never in that part of the bldg. I did not care enough. It was kind of weird since everyone had guns strapped, even the gals.
The ultra high mintage makes no sense. People are not using coins or even paper money any more from what I can see. More and more stores refuse to take cash.
Perhaps the mint is using seneirage to cover its operating costs.
As coins lose value due to inflation the attrition keeps going higher. Even in years where fewer coins are needed to operate the economy there are so many coins lost or destroyed the mint still has to make billions of coins to replace them.
The mintage of some coins is surprising. Quarters still have a nominal value and few people just discard them in the trash so a three billion mintage is surprising. There are 70 billion in circulation and a little more than 3% are lost each year. This suggests 2 billion have to be minted just to have the same number. I would guess the other billion results from an increase in the number of coins in sock drawers and storage.
People shouldn't think of "storage" as being dead inventory though. The reality is that coins don't normally stay in any kind of storage for more than three years. "Storage is more like a wide spot in the pipeline that keeps the economy going. During covid storage increased dramatically because banks were closed and not taking in depositors coins. This caused mintages to soar.
My understanding is the FED never sees coins to start with except on a ledger. The coins are shipped directly to the counting houses now days. The Chicago FED used to store a lot of coin but discontinued this as well. They simply don't physically have much to do with coins any longer. Rather than being the source of all coins they are an insignificant user of coin.
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Plenty of rural America uses them. Many here offer discounts for only using cash and coin over any card.
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