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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 2346382, member: 68&quot;]I used to drive around checking out banks for Gem examples of the current coins and checking dealer stocks of mint sets for older Gems.&nbsp; Sometimes I&#039;d find dozens and dozens of Gems on one of my jaunts. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>What wasn&#039;t too unusual was to walk into a coin shop and see the dealer sitting at a table cutting up mint sets for the cash register.&nbsp; Usually they were being cut up indiscriminately with every coin going to make change oin the shop.&nbsp; Of course some coins and some dates were set aside to be sent to the wholesalers but most of them were too cheap to pay for the postage.&nbsp; I&#039;d also look at my change when I left and amoung the cents from the teens there would be shiny new 1977 quarters.&nbsp; I&#039;d ask and they almost always told me they were cutting mint sets. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The most remarkable find I ever made in a dealers change were a couple brand new very gemmy 1969 quarters that were obviously not from minrt sets!!!&nbsp; I was just astounded because I had never seen a BU roll of &#039;69 quarters despite starting looking before 1969.&nbsp; I asked and he told me he had just bought four rolls from a customers and was salting the cash register with them. This was in the &#039;90&#039;s and even then these wholesaled for about 75c each.&nbsp; He allowed me to buy all the remaining coins and I got almost four entire rolls plus what was already in the cash register for face value.&nbsp; These coins are simply remarkable because &#039;69 quarters were extremely poorly made and almost none were saved in rolls.&nbsp; I&#039;ve spoken to the big wholesalers who tell me they rarely or never see this date.&nbsp; There were only a few suppliers in those days and they returned most of the single bag they set aside to the bank because of aenemic demand.&nbsp; But these coins were all well struck, relatively mark free, and obviously not mint set issues!!!</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>In the &#039;90&#039;s I even used to hear dealers tell customers to just spend BU rolls of clad quarters like the &#039;83-P. Even today there are dealers who are far behind the times. </p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>It&#039;s not only a huge attrition o the coins issued for ciculation but there is a huge attrition on the very few coins set aside by collectors.&nbsp; There are very few collections of clads and they often get destroyed by being spent if they come into a coin shop. Far more than 95% of coin collections of things like Washingtons, Jeffersons, Roosevelts, and Lincolns that come into coin shops end at 1964.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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