Which US Mints to be Retired?
Custerlost
Posts: 140 ✭✭✭
With the current political delete mentality, and less economic need for coinage, will San Francisco mint be shuttered? This year, or wound down in 2027 after the semiQ?
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it has been discussed on here that the elimination of the cent will free up minting capacity, enough to possibly close san fran. i've heard of n such plan
All opinions - no facts!
"When they can't find anything wrong with you, they create it!"
It's gonna free up capacity big time.
Pete
Maybe the U.S. could get back into the business of striking circulating coinage for other countries.
Closing sanfran, or even philly, wouldn't be bad.
Leave denver near the west coast anyway and sanfran is too expensive.
Philly, if needed to have east coast, could be shuttered and some could be done at west point.
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You will know that the private Pobjoy Mint closed in 2023, Finland's mint closed last year, and the UK mint announced it was making no new coins. All cited declining demand for coins as the reason. So it's only a matter of time before one or more U.S. mints close, regardless of who is in the White House.
San Fran has a lot of specialized equipment for the production of Proof and commemorative coins, and the trained people who know how to operate it.
As much as I like the Denver Mint (it is on the cover of my new book; see picture to left) it is redundant to what Philadelphia does.
The only question is, what would they do with the roughly $200,000,000,000 in gold reserves stored there.
the F mint (Fort Knox)
mint everything there
I could see them shuttering production at San Fran, does anybody but the collector community really care about proofs or special mintages of coins? The Lincoln cent has disappeared, surely some additional coins will follow. Maybe they’ll release the billions of dollars of coinage stored in vaults, that would make good sense to help reduce their budget.
I would rather Mint operations expanded so we can have a variety of mintmarks in circulation again. Just P & D is boring.
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does S have room for coining circulation strikes? (or is it really that small?)
Surely they do, as many millions of circulation strike coins have been made in that building over the past 89 years.
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For 13 of those years, they didn't make anything, and aside from cents in the late 60s/early 70s and then SBA dollars and some recent quarters, they haven't made any appreciable contribution to circulating coins since 1955.
Doesn't mean they don't have the space for it though.
God bless all who believe in him. Do unto others what you expect to be done to you. Dubbed a "Committee Secret Agent" by @mr1931S on 7/23/24. Founding member of CU Anti-Troll League since 9/24/24.
"Surely they do", you said. I disagree.
Cut back on bullion and commemorative issues and make proofs at Philadelphia again. They would make money by shutting down San Francisco and West Point.
It's heartening to see all these collectors who previously have venerated our branch mints, now airing opinions on which mints they want to quickly jettison.
I have many fond memories of ANA summer seminar floor tours of the Denver Mint, standing next to running equipment and sticking my hand under coins pouring out of a coin press. BTW, they are really hot, just warm. I would miss the old girl, but I am an honest man and I must admit that Denver is the most expendable mint.
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Some years ago the BEP opened a branch in Fort Worth, TX for business continuity purposes. They wanted two facilities in opposite parts of the country.
I assume the mint would not only one main facility in Philadelphia. There would need to be a fully functioning mint elsewhere. I don't know whether or not San Francisco is up to that task. So, Denver might be safe.
That was a neat experience!
Yeah, last time I had a floor tour of any mint (Philadelphia, 2009) all of the coin presses had safety shields, and they were so dirty on the insides y6ou could barely see what was going on in there.
Some tours the guide would pass around a pair of dies for the students to look at. In 1982 it was a pair of dies for the George Washington half dollar. Another time a guide showed us a file cabinet full of old collar dies. They still had some from Philippines coinage!
In 1981 we went down in the basement where they were packaging the Denver portion of the annual Mint Sets, which also included the S-Mint SBA dollars. While down there I noticed a hand-cranked cement mixer and some 100-pound sacks of dried, crushed corn cobs over in the corner of the adjacent room. In the center of the room was a large stainless steel tank with a lid. I casually asked the guide what that was for, and he said that because the press room sprayed some light machine oil on the planchets before they were struck to help the planchets feed better, they removed the oil before packaging the mint sets by dumping bags of coins in steel baskets, shaking them up and down in the tank which was full of liquid freon, and drying them off in the cement mixer along with a couple of scoops of the dried, crushed corn cobs! No wonder the Mint Set coins up to 1981 looked so baggy!!!
Why is Denver more expendable than the other branch mints?
Philadelphia has the main die making shop, the medal shop, the giant press ordered to make the five ounce silver "quarters," and a production floor for circulating coins opened in 1969. The giant room formerly used to make only cents could possibly absorb the West Point operation as well.
Denver has a small die making shop that relies on Philadelphia for its working hubs, and a relatively small production floor opened in 1906. It also has approximately $200,000,000,000 in gold stored in its vaults. It could easily stay open as the Fort Knox of the West without producing coins.
San Francisco has the equipment used to make Proof coins, and the people trained in using it. It may or may not have production space still available to strike the viable denominations, Dimes and Quarters, for distribution west of the Mississippi.
Does the Mint make that much on proof coinage? It seems like most of the sets are destined to be forgotten in a garage. I’m surprised there hasn’t been discussion of pausing or discontinuing production.
San Francisco made a good amount of cents in the 70's through 80's.