As of late I have resumed an activity that's part of my coin collecting hobby. I've purchased rolls of coins at banks before and gone through them when I've gotten home. The goodies are cherry-picked out and the rest find their way back to circulation. I've also acquired coins to look thru by paying for my cash purchases in whole dollar increments, though when there's been a lot of roll hunting and purchasing then it's time to win the "War on Change", meaning that I pay in exact change until the amount of change on hand has been drawn down to my liking. But when you do something different, like what I have resumed, coins are now bought by the box.
Let me explain that some.
A roll of cents contains 50 coins. I have bought $3 or $5 worth of cent rolls to look thru. I've also roll-searched nickels and half dollars. But upon reading the posts in the Coin Community Forum, I learned that there were avid box searchers out there. I've read about guys buying $2000 worth of half dollars from the bank to look for silver halves. I know of people searching through boxes of nickels and cents, looking for rarities. Yes, there are dime box searchers looking for that silver dime or two that has somehow escaped capture. I don't read very much about box searchers getting quarters, but it does happen. I'm sure that somewhere out there, there are a few who search through boxes of small dollar coins, looking for NIFC (Not Intended for Circulation) coins, and yes, there are plenty of those to be had with smalll dollars and half dollars as well.
Well as I am writing this I am presently going through a box of cents. This isn't, in my mind, your ordinary box of cents. I traded for this with a friend in Massachusetts. I have noticed that in previous visits to the northeast, that your chances of scoring wheat cents is better than here in the southwest, but that's not all. You get more Canadian cents than you do here, and I save most of them that I find as that they're not being made any more. But the real reason for going through an East Coast box is that coins minted out of Philadelphia are the dominant mint encountered, and the Philly mint throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s produced some cents with a rare die variety that wasn't produced out west on the Denver cents. You'll have to google "WAM" and Lincoln cents if you wish to know more about this.
The box I'm working on now is my fourth from the East Coast, and I think I may have finally scored one of these varieties. I now need to get over to my local favorite coin shop for an evaluation, and if they concur then I might sell the coin. I can't find anything (yet) on eBay on 1998 WAM cents, and research thus far suggests that the variety for this year is not as rare as it is for other years.
As for other denominations of boxes, I've done them for all except the small dollar coins, and I've kept records on a spreadsheet as to what I have found.
My intention is to report these in future posts.
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