Is picking copper out of rolls worth it?

My video of coin roll hunting pennies:
I found around 100+ coppers, right now not worth very much, what do y'all think of coin roll hunting pennies?

 

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What happened?
You wiped out all the Kennedy Halves from all your local banks?
Have fun

peace

 

Yes

 

Stay in school.

 

What is your time worth? Would you work for $3/hour? $5? $10?

Once you have collected up all these coppers, unless there's a buyer in your hometown, you have a massive freight bill to deal with. I have never understood the "economics" of copper cents.

Here is a price chart going back almost 30 years, the price of copper in dollars per pound, delivered:

 

How about he stays in school and goes away? Advertising and announcing contests, but hey, it's all good, right?

 

Perhaps you should explain to him that cents are not grade A.

 

I save copper pennies but not in crazy quantities. You can sell rolls of them on Ebay for above face value. But as someone else said the problem is shipping costs. If you could find a local buyer then you could make a little money from them. I don't think going crazy saving/hoarding coppers as some CRHunders do is a profitable exercise if you are only doing it with the hope of making money someday. The time you would spend hunting and sorting won't offset the little profit you could make. As far as down the road, who knows. If the price of copper goes up over the next few decades it might become more profitable but that is big unknown. Anyway, I save the coppers only because I am already hunting for wheats just for the fun of it. If I weren't hunting for wheats I wouldn't bother saving coppers.

 

What are you guys doing!? You know you cant present facts like this on a forum. Someone may get offended

 

If everything Hits The Fan, if fiat money is only good for restroom cleanup, if it takes a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy groceries, hard metal will retain its value. That's what all the PM folks say.

Assuming that's true, the old saw says that a silver dime will still buy you a loaf of bread, and an ounce of gold will still buy you a nice suit.

By the same token, a hundred copper cents presumably will still buy you a loaf of bread, and a hundred thousand of them will buy you that nice suit.

Is it worthwhile? Do you think your local post-apocalyptic tailor will agree?

 

I follow a couple people on YouTube in the numismatic community. One of them has a machine that can sort out copper. Pretty cool machine. The argument I've heard in the past was based on someone wanting to melt the coins. They said it's not worth it because it's an alloy and to separate the different alloys would cost more than the melt value of copper. NOW, I have never thought of it in that regards with buying things if paper money becomes worthless.

 

My question still stands -- will the OP work for $3/hour?

I assure you, you will only be in your teens once. You will only be in your 20s once. Make the most of those years, instead of squinting at endless piles of pennies for, umm, $3/hour.

Not only that, it's a zero-sum game; the more coppers other squinters find, the fewer available for YOU to find, so over time, your odds get worse and worse.

I quit searching rolls about 1964-65, when silver coins simply disappeared overnight.
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If you want to MAKE money in the world of collectibles, coins or whatever, become an expert in something, or better yet, four or five somethings, especially those that show up now and then at flea markets, garage sales, and estate sales.

There's so many specialty books, and so much information online (that includes Coin Talk, certainly) that it is WAAAAAAY easier to become an expert than it used to be. Expert$ make money, lots of it; better yet, they keep their mouths shut about it, cheerfully evade taxes, and keep a low profile.

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Finally, before somebody cites "the law," let's dismiss the "legal tender" issue, because it has no bearing on the OP's "penny" question:

"...Up until the late 19th century, pennies and nickels weren’t legal tender at all. The Coinage Acts of 1873 and 1879 made them legal tender for debts up to 25 cents only, while the other fractional coins (dimes, quarters, and half dollars) were legal tender for amounts up to $10.

This remained the law until the Coinage Act of 1965 specified that all U.S. coins are legal tender in any amount. However, even in cases where legal tender has been agreed to as a form of payment, private businesses are still free to specify which forms of legal tender they will accept.

If a shop doesn’t want to take any currency larger than $20 bills, or they don’t want to take pennies at all, or they want to be paid in nothing but dimes, they’re entitled to do so (but, as mentioned earlier, they should specify their payment policies before entering into transactions with buyers).

Businesses are free to accept or reject pennies as they see fit; no law specifies that pennies cease to be considered legal tender when proffered in quantities over a particular amount."
[snopes.com]

 

no.

 

No, what?

 

I'm not quite sure what all of that was in response to, but it, unfortunately, is not going to matter. The OP lives in his own little dreamworld where he, as with many his age, knows everything and listens to/considers nothing unless it fits his warped views of the world. This thread is just an advertisement anyway, and as long as he gets his precious little clicks and likes, that's all that matters.

Still, when one posts a copper price chart to a thread centered on cents, it is perfectly reasonable to point out the fact cents are not of the purity/form or value quoted in said charts. This has nothing to do with legal tender.

 

bambam has hit upon one of the few good things about hoarding pennies -- no one will steal them. You can leave them in piles around your living room, inside the dishwasher (the power and the water are off), in the garage covered with a tarp, anywhere.

No one will steal them.

 

Haha... now we're on to something!

 

No one said that cents fit the parameters of copper prices, but the chart should demonstrate the futility of trying to outguess the commodity markets.

I wanted to show, and did show, how little money you can make for lots of effort.

There was a time when lots of folks thought you could get "rich" sorting out copper cents. Never happened, unless your timing was spectacular. Copper, by the way, is NOT a PM; it's a commodity that costs less than hamburger.

 

Well, it keeps better. At least if it's not wrapped around a zinc core.

 

I doubt he reads the responses anyway.
He'll post a generic response later.
If he really dropped out of high school (You Tube video) to do this,
it's going to be a life decision that he will regret in the future.