Average value of coins returned in change per pound

@KBBPLL - here is a screen shot of the spreadsheet. It's fuzzy but you should be able to see the breakdown per change back, with totals at the bottom. The averages above are a bit different due to dividing by 99.

 

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Obviously my "thought experiment" was faulty. I duplicated your spreadsheet and came up with the same result. Average 1.5151515152 quarters 0.8080808081 dimes 0.404040404 nickels 2.0202020202 cents.

Just went to stock up at the beer store and they were out of quarters, so I got 6 dimes back. That will skew my results! I'm wondering if the way merchants price items is messing up the expected average.

 

Done with the cents but need to correct a couple earlier mistakes.

My original prediction was $12.60 per pound and 27.8 pounds which would equal $350.28; I wrote $358.28.

The previous sum was$308.30, should have been $305.30

There was a dime with the cents, so changed dimes to 866. This changes the total to $305.40



Cents count was 1450, $14.50.

Total is $319.90. I predicted $358.28 (but it should have been $350.28), not great but would be close enough to get an idea of value based on weight. Odd how close the cents came but how far off the others were. The comparison is:
Predicted Actual
1¢ 1,413 - $14.13 1,450 - $14.50
5¢ 284 - $14.20 506 - $25.30
10¢ 567 - $56.70 866 - $86.60
25¢ 1,061 - $265.25 774 - $193.50
Totals $350.28 $319.90

This was fun. I'm hoping to get more spare change collections and build up the metrics.

 

Predicted Actual
1¢ 1,413 - $14.13 1,450 - $14.50
5¢ 284 - $14.20 506 - $25.30
10¢ 567 - $56.70 866 - $86.60
25¢ 1,061 - $265.25 774 - $193.50
Totals $350.28 $319.90

Looks like the people hoarding Nicklels messed with your calculations
$11.675 per pound

 

You may be right @rte. I refigured the weight of the cent to 2.6g, as @-jeffB suggested due to there being many more zincs than coppers, so my total is a bit less (see below). The previous comparison got scrunched together; all of the spaces were eliminated, my bad. I re-did it in excel, added the weights in, then took a screenshot, much cleaner.



The scale read 28.4 pounds but included the bucket (about .5 lbs.), the actual weight is 28.3, so the scale was fairly close.

This would be $11.30 per pound, predicted $12.60, off by about 9%. If the average transaction was 50¢ change back, there would be about 640 transactions on $319.90:

 

I have a couple random samples on a smaller scale.