Copper zinc cents turning bad often latley? I'm running into more and more cents rotting latley have any of you noticed a decline? As you know I look at a lot of circulated cents in a month's time, up to 20,000 or 30,000 each month. Latley I've noticed a decline in quality that is alarming. Now it may just be more and more people turning change in a bad economy to get money for food and such but the overall quality has been getting much worse. I was just wondering if others have seen this? Also I have been finding much fewer varieties than ever before. I've had dry spells before but not like this past 8 months or so. Just wondering???
Coin Dude I agree. I have gone through a lot of pennies this year separating the copper from the zinc and have noticed that there are a lot rotten Memorial Cents.:kewl::kewl:
Theory: Since the cent normally didn't really circulate the Zincolns tended to go from the Mint to the bank to the store to the public to jars where they stayed safe and dry and survived. With the bad economy many of those cents are now coming out of those hoards and actually doing some circulating and being constantly exposed to moisture, salt, skin acids etc and this is causing the shortcomings of the zinc composition to become apparent. So it isn't anything new about the Zincolns, it's just we are now seeing what happens if they are really used like they were intended to be used.
I ran into tons of rotten zinc cents years ago when I was actively roll searching. I don't want to hi-jack this thread, but I am curious: How many wheat cents are folks finding per, say, every $25 worth of pennies. From late '03 through early '05, I went through more than $11K worth of pennies, or about 1.1 million of them. In that period, I took out about $100 worth of wheats dated before 1956. I also found about $30 worth of 56-D, 57-D, and 58-D that I set aside, including 2 56-D RPMs. Fwiw, my average number of wheats per $25 worth of pennies was about 8.
I spend a lot of time both in Virginia and Myrtle Beach, SC. I haven't noticed anything different with the Virginia coins during the past year but the SC coins are really bad. Shortcomings are significant.
