What a scam. I just spent/threw away, 115.00 including shipping to fill 10 spots in my Buffalo nickel book. Out of 120 coins from two different sellers. No usable mint marks. Only adding ones with dates that can be clearly read. The third and final roll arrived today. 6 dollars for shipping took 6 days to get here. Open it up... all unusable. Didn't even have decent 1935s! Supposed to be an 'old' unsearched roll. I suspect it was a new wrapper that had been beat up a bit to appear old. Just don't know what the chances are of a supposedly 'old' roll having so many nickels that were that worn out. Many no dates. Lesson learned. Would have been better off getting one coin.
Vess: We all make mistakes, the hard part is to not repeat them. Better luck in the future, but buy the coin, not the pot luck.
If a roll is not original (all one date), then it's been searched, but maybe not by the seller. If the roll shows a worn coin (less than Unc) on one or both ends, then it's been searched, but maybe not by the seller. If you are down to 10 Buffalos, it's HIGHLY unlikely you will find any of them in rolls since you are probably looking for the better dates. Buy them as singles (but then, you know that by now.)
I'm not down to 10. I just filled 10. I'm just starting a new book of them. The idea was that I would buy a few rolls to kick things off and see if I could pull several decent nickels out of the rolls to get it started before I began buying singles. Two of the rolls I bought were from one seller with all good dates. But 59 out of 80 ended up being 35-37s. Yeah, they may be worth a buck a piece but what am I supposed to do with all of them? I should have known better.
Okay, misunderstood your original post. Instead of buying rolls to find coins you don't have yet, think about buying incomplete sets until you get close, THEN individual coins. You have seen what rolls get you. Sell what you don't want from the rolls you just got (which appears to be almost all.) Describe accurately (which apparently your sellers didn't.) That gets part of your money back to spend on what you do want. I, like you, recently had to bite the bullet and take what I got because I wasn't careful enough when I bought.
