I received a note from Virg Marshall that the Fed is not taking any orders for any 2018 nickels and dimes currently as they are so backed up with a glut of coins right now because commerce/banks/business do not need them. So, if you do not see any for some time this is the problem. Marshall's is also looking for leads on rolls or boxes also. FYI
No just less demands on the fed. Think about transactions you witness daily....how many are actually cash? < 5% ? Sooner or later they will be out there in the main stream,as for now the banks aren't asking for large cash or coin deliveries.
Yes but if the Fed is not getting as many requests and they are able to fill orders with circulated coins on hand, they stop ordering from the Mint and the mint stops production. If the trend continues of the Fed estimates that they have enough on hand to handle anticipated requests for the rest of the year you get a low mintage year like 2009 was.
I do believe mintages are set by congress. I know for a fact that the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Baltimore branch there's tons of coins in their vaults that have sat there for years! Yes correct mostly dollar coins,but demand for businesses to order coinage to make change has fallen. I asked a food store manager what sort of change order do they place a week? His reply we get one delivery a week for hard coins, we have a 5 day a week pick up by Brinks. He then said yes we do recieve once a week enough of singles and fives, to maintain the self check outs . His next sentence was 90% of their business is electonic transactions that didn't include food stamps which now are also done on a card. Then of course manufacturers coupons that does varry as some demographics do use them others don't. Then the conversation turned to checks....years ago working in a retail food store we handeled a lot of checks. I can remember running yards of calcuator tapes, no longer they too are done by eletronics just like your debit cards. A check is written processed at the location and handed back to the customer. No longer need to send into the bank to clear. Years ago you had perhasp 15 check out lanes or cash register old school name. You may of had 1 or 2 full time cashiers the rest were part time. The safe held pans for the register. Each pan assigned to a cashier. Each pan had a ba k of $100 . So to cover all personel you may have 30 pans @$100 each when they went on break ,lunch, or home the pans were counted out back to $100. For their next shift. Now a days a retail food store operation may only have 3 cashiers open and up to 10 self check out stations. The cashier never opens any longer with a $100 bank as it isn't nessary, as customers pay more with a card or use the self check out.
The only mintages set by Congress are maximum mintages for commemoratives. The only other I can recall off the top of my head were not actually mintages but the ratio of Sac and NA dollars compared to the President dollars but no specific figures for any of them were set.
