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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Howard Black, post: 3512809, member: 97119&quot;]It&#039;s not just coins. Several years ago, someone posted to the camera collector list (IDCC) about something similar -- he stopped in at the local thrift shop on a lark; he hadn&#039;t been there for a while and decided to pop it. It was having an &quot;all you can fit in a grocery sack for $5 sale.&quot; He browsed around, and saw some photo gear sitting on a shelf. There was a box with it, full of even more stuff. By the time he left, he&#039;d filled up $10 worth of grocery bags with classic Nikon and Leica gear -- bodies, lenses, accessories -- thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of stuff. He recognized much of it because he&#039;d originally sold it!</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m sure the survivors -- IMO in all likelihood the widow&#039;s &quot;adult children&quot; -- advised her to just &quot;get rid of that old crap&quot; (probably reinforced with &quot;It&#039;s not even <i>digital</i>! And get a load of this -- you&#039;ve even got to futz around with all kinds of <i>settings</i>! It won&#039;t even <i>focus</i> itself! No one in his right mind would ever want to <i>buy</i> garbage like this. If you don&#039;t want to just toss it in the trash, then see if they&#039;ll let you donate it to the thrift shop.&quot;)</p><p><br /></p><p>I wince inside every time I think of how many Leica, Canon, Nikon, Voitlander, etc., etc., etc. classics are decomposing in landfills across the country.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s the prevalence of this mentality that makes me think &quot;The Great American Coin Hunt&quot; will be a huge flop, and that the dealers who slipstreamed all those rare/valuable coins into circulation might just as well have put them in bottles and dropped them into the middle of the ocean. By the time a scant few of them are ever found by someone who&#039;ll recognize them for what they are, they&#039;ll have been scraped, scratched, worn, and in many cases given the &quot;ring of death&quot; by coin roll sealing machines -- if not gouged into oblivion by bored morons.</p><p><br /></p><p>Offhand I&#039;d guess that on average I see at least one bronze penny per roll that some @#$^#$% has spent maybe a half hour or so going at it with an awl or some other pointy object. On the ones where the date and mint mark are completely removed I always wonder if it was a &#039;55 DDO or something of similar caliber -- and I&#039;m sure that there ARE uber-valuable coins that have been intentionally destroyed -- just as there are pennies that people have spent decades searching for, which are now sitting in closets full of 5 gallon jugs, awaiting the day it becomes legal to melt them down (while the hoarders sit there eagerly awaiting that day, never for a moment considering that ONE penny in that hoard could easily be worth several times the entire tonnage -- and if anyone were to bring this up, the likely response would be something along the lines of, &quot;What kind of an idiot do you take more for? I&#039;m not gonna waste my time going through all that damn <b><i>change</i></b>! It&#039;s got <i>real </i>value -- it&#039;s <i>copper</i>!&quot;)</p><p><br /></p><p>Well, I&#039;ve slipped into Cranky Old Man mode, so I guess I&#039;l quit typing and see if there are any kids I can go chase off my lawn. &lt;g&gt;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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