So, I was at my local VFW last night and ordered a beer. When my change came there was an odd-looking quarter. I thought it was Canadian, but it turned out to be a 2004 Australian 10 cent coin. That had to be the strangest coin I ever received in change. What is the strangest coin you ever got in your change in the US.
When I was a bartender, here, in Southwest Florida, we'd get a lot of visitors from the Caribbean islands, Central America and South America. They would often leave them as a tip. The local banks wouldn't accept them, so I would give the non-silver ones away to young kids.
Nice find. Here is a bit of info in case you haven't already looked it up https://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces1565.html
Too bad my lunch lady when I was in grade school didn't like foreign coins, Canadian quarters to be exact. If she had, she would have accepted them and I'd get to eat a lunch. She stopped selling me the .50 lunch when she found out that I was the one passing the Canadian quarters off to her. This was back in the mid 70's. My mother was a waitress at the Buena Vista on Fisherman's Wharf (San Francisco) and used to get them in her tips. She'd end up giving them to me for my lunch money and leave it up to me to get lunch with them......or not. To this day, every time I see the antlers on the one side of the coin, I toss'em in the trash.
The ones my mother used to give me were primarily early 70's. My mother would have kept anything silver that she got, I'm sure. Since she used to get tons of coins from various countries in her tips every night, being a somewhat famous establishment in Fisherman's Wharf, she used to research every coin she got to find out if it was worth anything first, before getting rid of them. Back then I'm sure these Canadian Quarters were worth more if passed off as .25 US cents. The exchange rate was probably .15 US cents for each one of those (just guessing) back in the mid 70's. This year below is like the ones I used to get for my lunch money:
