At work as I was opening a roll of nickels in my till, I noticed there were some extra shiney coins in there. Ended up getting 5 proof nickels! I was really surprised to ever see a proof in change. 2 1989-s 2 1991-s 1986-s David
Neat finds, David. Sounds like somebody threw away some money. That was several dollars worth of coins.
They still look pretty good, great mirror like finish. I am unsure of their value since they have been handled, maybe a slight fingerprint here and there. David
If they still have a good mirror finish, they probably haven't been in circulation very long. Never ceases to amaze me what is found in rolls. Keep up the search, every so often something truely nice will pop up.
There are a lot of proof coins in circulation and there are thousands of different ways they get there. But the odds off getting five proof nickels in a single roll go beyond the astronomical and imply exactly from whence these came and how they got there. These almost certainly came from someone who was busting up sets to assemble rolls of the individual coins. These rolls are steady sellers and bring pretty good prices. In most cases the coins are actually worth more out of the sets than they are worth in the set because they are needed for date and mint collections which are vigorous sellers to the public and most people don't bust their sets. Most of the buyers of these rolls insist on there being no culls included so the people making he rolls often just roll up the poor examples (~3 to 10% of mintage) and haul them to the bank. These coins do have some value still but it is rather nominal and buyers are not easily found. Many people like the idea of "salting" the coins in circulation anyway so they end up there. Not many years ago almost the entire value of these sets was almost exclusively represented in the half dollar and cent so the entire rest of the set would sometimes go into circulation no matter the quality of the coins. The coins rarely circulate long before they are found and removed by a collector though about 1998 I found a '68-S quarter in VG! These coins got together in a roll because the nickels returned to the bank were sent to a counting house like Brinks and were tossed in a hopper for the coin roller. There were enough coins in the hopper that five went into a single roll. Of course the possibility of some rolls being entirely proofs can not be ruled out and all that can be said for sure is the guy busted at least three dates of proof sets and that there must have been at least about a couple hundred of culls for so many to find there way into the same roll. This, of course, presumes it was a normal roll from the bank and not a paper one returned by a customer.
Actually, these were rolls that were wrapped by an individual and not bank wrapped. I should have bought the remaining rolls...who knows what else I could have found. David
