Price of 2019 and 2020 W Quarters

That is so ironic! The U.S. Mint played games with us collectors on this idiotic "w" quarter hunt for 2019 and 2020, then when it would actually make a little sense to continue for the last quarter in 2021, they declined to do it! Kind of reminds me of their introduction of the BIZ "s" quarter in 2012 (after introduction of ATB quarters starting in 2010) but they continued them to the bitter end. Go figure!

 

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My wife and I have been watching for "W" for 2 years. A former student of my wife told her that she hasn't seen one. We bank at the North Carolina State Employees' Credit Union and I've spoken to to the Manager and he said that he and his employees have been watching out for them, but, to no avail. Would a Credit Union not be in the loop to get anything special. One of the tellers did trade a Franklin Mint Gold coated quarter. He told me that most coins go to their machine and they usually get quarters from customers. I am getting a lot of 2021 and 2020 Quarters from stores that I shop out, but with the Pandemic and other stuff we usually use our VISA. I watch my VISA account closely because there has been a lot of crooked charges. Not me of course.
Anyway, aside from crooked transactions and petty theft, there has been no problems with our Credit Union.

 

Wow...I never find ANY "W's" on circulated coins that I come into contact with. I would be extremely excited if I did - lucky you!

 

I am always impressed by the kindness and generosity of many of our members. Some really great people here.

 

They didn't play any games with anyone. They did something that was fun and exciting that many people enjoyed. Then the ill conceived lockdowns hit and change started being a one way street causing shortages in places as people stopped using cash and stopped/couldn't go to banks to deposit the change they collected. The mint finished off what they had planned and didn't announce anything new as they didn't want to be doing programs where the result of them is people hoarding coins with big bank orders looking for them and wanted to simplify everything in the chain.

They will likely be back in some form in the future especially since the coming up quarter programs for the next few years will be a big time snoozefest to most people

 

It was a blast! Now it's a search and rescue for the remaining ones.

 

Perhaps you enjoyed hunting, but some who found them charged ridiculous prices. Those who were collecting them to round out their ATB collections did not enjoy paying those prices. Thousands more who couldn't find any "w" ATB quarters in 2019 and 2020 and 2021 do not share your enjoyment. And the Mint did not "finish off" because they did not issue any "w" quarter for the last ATB in 2021.

 

Prices are very reasonable all things considered. You don't need them for an ATB series unless you want them. By all measures the program was a massive massive success and it was great to see excitement back into change. Had the ill conceived lockdowns not happened the program likely would have continued. It will likely be back at some point and I sure hope it is

 

Just going to say, from my perspective, if you didn't find any, you weren't really looking for them very hard, there was 1.651 billion quarters minted in 2019, and 1.116 billion minted in 2020. Of those, 10 million 2019 Ws and 10 million 2020 Ws.

I didn't look too hard compared to others, searching around $500-$750 a week in quarters and still managed to get 3 designs. If you expected them to turn up regularly in your pocket change, or be easier after the fresh rolls all entered circulation, I don't know what to tell you besides it was a bad bet. The mintage was less than 1% of the total mintage for either year and once they entered the pool of circulated and every other year hanging around still, it becomes a needle in a haystack.

It wasn't easy for me to find what I did manage to find, I worked for it. Sure you might happen upon a W by luck, but not if you continued using your debit card and not getting change back regularly hoping to randomly happen upon one by devine intervention.

I know that anyone that has been hunting quarters in 2019 or 2020 did find what they were looking for, maybe not all of the designs, but at least one, or some depending on how hard they were looking and not giving up until they did find at least one.

It is what it is, I'm not bitter that I didn't get at least one of each design with a W on it, I will get there eventually if I keep looking and keep spending cash and taking change instead of using it so I don't get any, the reality is one in 16 people will find one randomly, and only if they are looking for it, and only 2 million people can have a complete set of 10 regardless of condition but that leaves out a whole lot of people from having just 1W if there's 2 million trying to get a complete set.

Meanwhile, there's wear and attrition already taking it's toll on the mintage numbers and more coins being produced each year. you couldn't go to the bank and set aside full rolls of Ws, These's aren't bicentennial quarters. I don't expect the prices to ever go down unless folks just flat out lose interest in them completely. it might stay where it is for a while, but attrition and wear will have their effects.

Also going to say 1955S lincoln cent was 44.6 million mintage, and 1954 71.6 million mintage. These were 2 million x 10 designs. any way you want to calculate it, that's a much smaller mintage.

 

@John Burgess: edit first paragraph. Million not billion.

 

fixed, thanks for pointing that out.

 

Perfect distribution would mean 1 of 165 2019s and 1 of 112 2020s should be out there. So every 4 rolls if you can get bank fresh rolls for those dates. But it's getting harder to find places that have these rolls available or even any change at all.

But these numbers aren't much different than the 1955-S cents of yesteryear which were predominantly distributed in only one region.

I live in a smaller city and I haven't seen rolls of new coins in about twenty years here. I know they are going somewhere, but it's not here. We seem to be getting second hand coins.

It's like expecting to find something that was missed in an already searched bag of wheaties. Of course the last time I did that was about 1988 when I bought a bag of S-mint wheaties on a business trip to San Francisco. The bag was in luggage that got damaged at the airport and I wound up with only about 9 rolls worth. I guess that broke my spirits for roll searching.

 

agree on the estimate, I was hunting based on 1 per 4-5 rolls as an average, it was less of course, but you'd go 10-15 rolls of nothing, then get one with 2-3-4 in it. the calculation isn't that far off, if you can get brand new unsearched solid rolls, likely about 2-3 per 10 rolls. but it's not balanced and even distributed.

the 1955S mint cents were distributed as you say, but people could get rolls or bags of them when they were released and set it aside, and I think that's the difference really, like bicentennials, people could save rolls or a bag of them pretty easy, you'd have to get really lucky to get a roll of 40 Ws, much less a roll of each design for both years,,, or spend an arm and a leg on ebay probably to do it. it's why BU 1999 and 2000 state quarters keep turning up, after 2 decades, people are like "why am I holding on to these rolls, it's still $10".

I still think there's going to be a lot of Uncirculated W quarters saved, but there's going to be a fair percentage that slips through the cracks also and circulated, nobody could set aside rolls of them really like was done with the 1950D nickels even. I think this has to do something, maybe not immediately, but in a lot shorter time frame than it took the 1950D nickels that's for sure.

 

My experience over the years is that over about 40 years, mint products overwhelmingly find their way back to below their initial price from the mint (sell price, not buy price) . But errors and the occasional overlooked product increase in value. After about 10 years, I would be very surprised if the W 2019 and W 2020 quarters are higher than now.

 

Its very possible your small city is of the size, that they just don't need to order in new coin and it all circulates captively. In my area If I wanted new coin I needed to go to banks nearby the business area. If I went to predominantly residential areas it was always customer wrapped rolls and plenty on their shelves that you couldn't run them low enough to have to place a change order.

maybe it's to a point the local armored carrier is picking up and redistributing locally, or the banks shift it around in house from branch to branch, and never needs to order in new coin because the supply exceeds the demand in that area always.

When I was hunting, I'd occasionally get stuck taking customer wrapped rolls, just so the branch would need to place a coin order for a chance at getting a new box, if I wouldn't take the customer wrapped to get it out of their vault, I'd need to wait for others to take it so they could place an order again.

Could be something like that going on also, and just needing the connection at the branch to give you enough coin to run them down to a point where they need to order in new coin and up your chances of getting fresh material from distribution.

My branch manager would say, "look, I can't order this week, I've got $500 or $750 or $1000 in quarters people turned in I need to get rid of first before I can place an order".
So I'd offer to take his excess, so he could place an order for new the next week. Sometimes though it's just so buried, there's no digging it out by myself though and I'd have to wait, I'm not taking 500 rolls of customer wrapped quarters. LOL.

there's roll hunting strategies for these type of scenarios involving going to a bigger city to get rolls (but this makes the glut in town worse if you dump in town), or dumping your searched coin out of town in the hopes it doesn't recirculate back to town and keeps on moving away lowering the local supply below the demand. (this will recover eventually though and hit the balance, it doesn't last unless you keep dumping out of town).

 

I have found lately that I get about 1 W for every Box I search. I was surprised that in the last couple of boxes I found 2019 W's. This last box yielded 1 2020 Samoa (bat) W which I have since passed on to another member. They are still out there and findable for both years. They were not well distributed with people finding over 60 in a singe box many times. That happened in my area where I was able to find a bunch (over 100) Weir Farms in rolls bought from my grocery store over a 4 week period.

 

Yes, it was a win-win! Great members here. I was just going to complain about a couple non-sensical expensive modern quarters and found great generosity instead!

 

I agree with many of the comments above. I do believe these W's did take a little spur into the hobby. It is fun to roll hunt to an extent and to bring that sort of public attention to a program that probably needed a little revival is nice.

I will fully admit that I do not roll hunt. I know that to have these, I will likely have to pay a premium on Ebay, and for the first 7, I was comfortable paying $15-20 a coin to have an example without the roll hunting. I am not ok paying $40-60 for a coin of the same year with supposedly the same mintage and that is what I was running into on the last three. I can add to my Walker set I am working on for that price! Thankfully generosity of others here have helped me in this endeavor. I can see these W's still being a hot item for some time, especially as circulation and wear hits most of them bringing availability of the uncirculated set down. Time will tell though.

 

On eBay people are hoping someone would pay that for what ever reason

 

Based on @John Burgess numbers, 0.723% of the quarters minted in 19&20 were Ws. I live in the Dallas area and I started CRH-ing in February of this year and have kept meticulous (anal?) records of my efforts. Thankfully, my bank manager gladly orders whatever I want and does not charge me for it. I've searched 159,860 quarters and have found 106 Ws - a hit rate of 0.067%. Of those 106, only 2 of them are Memorial Park! I've been trying to make some trades for more MPs and just recently bought one from a guy on a Coin discord server (I hope that works out, btw), but other than that, they are very hard to come by. I will be submitting the best samples for grading - which brings me to a question: PCGS or NGC?