1971 P Nickel... Scarce?

@cladking brings up a couple excellent points...

1) Collectors do better than investors cause they know the true scarcity/rarity from their set building. In my case, I would have never known that the 1971 nickel was scarce had I not been filling out a folder from circulation.

2) For the reason mentioned in #1, most people take modern coins from mint sets and just throw them into circulation without thinking twice. I would have never hesitated to take modern coins from sets and spend them after cutting out what I needed.

 

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Its possible that roll search guy in your area has been pulling them. They are low enough mintage that if they are keeping copper cents and lower mintage nicks they may be pulling the 71P nicks out. Not a big premium, but maybe hording for the long run.
Also the fact that the 71P dime is the lowest mintage of that series (except for the 2009) there may be some cross over interest in them.
I doubt that either of these reasons account for big numbers, but maybe enough to be a small factor?
But I would guess, if you are on the east coast you could find at least one in a box of nicks (that's $100 worth or 2,000 coins) Just given the amount of each year minted and the odds, given no other factors, you might see one in every 1,000 coins. On the west coats, would be a lot harder.

 

I've never done the math but I'd guess you're fairly close. Maybe just a little low.

There is a difference between the coasts for nickels and pennies even that old because they didn't circulate that well even in the '70's. I don't think you'll see much difference with dimes and quarters though.

The absolute number of these in nice condition like XF is surprisingly low. There just aren't many collections and the few that do exist have been started since these were already worn. To find even a nice VF today requires you look through about 10 boxes and an XF is pretty unlikely unless you find a mint set cast off from the last 15 years.

 

Well I finally got them. Went to the bank today and asked for a box. They didn't have a full box but they were able to give me $60 worth (30 rolls). Went through all 30 rolls and found 3 of them lol.

They were all circulated with typical wear. One was brownish and wasn't appealing to the eye. Needless to say I tossed that one back in the pile and kept the other two to fill out my folders.

I also got about a dozen pre-1960 nickels. The oldest being 1939-P. I will post a photo of them later in this thread as well as the roll searching results thread.

All the comments here were great and informative, so thank you all.

For what it's worth I also saw like 5 1971-D. I normally don't see more Denver than Philadelphia here on the east coast. In the months prior to today I saw about 10-12 Denver nickels but never a Philly. That also suggests to me that the Philly is scarcer.

 

There ya go. nic hunting

 

I didn't take a photo of the 1971-P nickels but here are the pre-1961 (and a couple 2009) nickels as promised...