I've been fascinated by the subject of wear on coins for a while. I always wondered how long it takes a coin to be "in circulation" to start exhibiting appreciable wear. I never really found someone who would take a stance on this until I saw this video, by Cabbage Coins where the host has John Albanese of CAC explain to him the grade he would assign to a really nice 1917-S Standing Liberty Quarter. Albanese explains that he had a friend put a gem 1946 Walker in his pocket every day for 45 days while he was on vacation. He said it took that much time for that coin to pick up even the slightest amount of rub. In his opinion, that's how hard it is to get rub on coins. At minute mark 49:11, he explains why he'd give it a grade of 64 instead of PCGS' 65, and later says, "So, someone (might) say, 'Oh, it's not really wear. It's cabinet friction, like it's slid across the cabinet.' You could take a Gem BU 17-S quarter and slide it across the cabinet or put it in your pocket for two weeks; it's still going to be a Gem BU. It takes a lot to put rub or wear on a coin. And rub is just a nice way of saying 'slight wear.' (With) a lot of coins today that are uncirculated, (they) probably saw some circulation. There's just no evidence of circulation." His comments make a lot of sense, but it made me wonder about "bag marks" on coins. Is the wear on coins that are really "baggy" actually from sitting in a mint bag or bank bag? I mean, just how much are those coins "banging around" each other if they're just SITTING there, still as death, for sometime years on end? I would think "bag-mark wear" comes from MOVEMENT and CONTACT, wouldn't it?
Having a single coin in your pocket for a month or a year isn't going to do much if anything to it, but I guess it depends on what else is in there with it. Wear comes from being handled, and the points of the coin that get touched the most are the high points so those are where to look for wear. As far as bag marks they are a very real thing. The mint today conveys/dumps/loads newly minted coins into "ballistic" bags, made for conveying large quantities to Federal Reserve banks where they are rolled and distributed to banks and businesses. Quarter bags for example will hold approximately 200,000 quarters and weigh over 2,500 pounds. Imagine those being handled by forklifts, loaded into and off of trucks and traveling over the roadways, then transferred/conveyed into rolling machines. While the bags may sit idle for long stretches of time, when they are moving, they are going to have a lot of shifting, and on average, the lower in the bag a coin resides the more and heavier "bag marks" it will receive. Looking through new rolls of quarters, you will see markings from the reeded edges ruining the look on most. Here is a good explanation the current bags used by the mint. MODERN BALLISTIC COIN BAGS
When I was a kid there was a small coin shop between my school and home where many of my afternoons and much of my lunch money were spent. The old fellow that runs the place was very adamant with me that a coin was like being pregnant it was uncirculated or it wasn't. Once that coin was slid into a pocket it would never again be uncirculated.... Now coin grading has advanced far beyond my old coin mentor fifty years ago, but I do think we give uncirculated grades a very wide lane these days. As far as bagginess goes, when I watch coining videos from the mint and those coins shoot out of the press faster than you can see and they are banging on top of each other in a big wheelie bin stacked with previously minted coins, I can certainly justify "bagginess" in my mind. Imagine that process going on with heavy Morgans. It is exactly why I get rather excited when I see a dollar coin that doesn't exhibit much bagginess!
The larger the coin, the better the chance of bagginess. Then if it is silver, a softer metal, the bagginess goes up exponentially.
