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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 898620, member: 68&quot;]Not only are the gems virtually unknown from rolls from some dates but rolls of some dates are virtually unknown.&nbsp; This last is only a slight exaggeration.&nbsp; I&#039;ve been collecting the clad quarters since 1972 and have never actually seen an original roll of 1969-P&#039;s.&nbsp; I know a few exist and have heard tales of them but haven&#039;t seen one despite looking.&nbsp; You can find mint set rolls but not BU rolls.&nbsp; I just missed seeing one back in the &#039;80&#039;s when someone cashed some in at a coin shop.&nbsp; There were five or six rolls the dealer dumped in the cash register but then decided there were too many quarters and pulled out as couple handfuls and put in a bowl.&nbsp; They were&nbsp; still in the bowl a couple weeks later when I showed up and bought them for 25c each.&nbsp; It was incredibly a batche of very choice rolls.&nbsp; What makes it incredible is that quality was exactly the reason these didn&#039;t get saved; they were so poor no one bothered.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>But it&#039;s not just most of the quarters that aren&#039;t available but some of most denominations.&nbsp; It&#039;s never low mintage that makes them tough, it&#039;s the fact that people never saw any point in saving modern debased junk; especially where it was very poor quality.&nbsp; There are some gems that appear in rolls and they can even be &quot;common&quot; after a fashion.&nbsp; But common in this instance usually means all the gems in all the rolls in the world won&#039;t add up to much more than a few handfulls.&nbsp; There are exceptions where gems certainly measure in the hundreds of thousands but this applies only to cents.&nbsp; Even the bicentennial quarter which was common as dirt probably can&#039;t be found more than about 75,000 as gems in rolls.&nbsp; Circulation coins are generally poorly struck from worn and misaligned dies and are banged up long before they leave the mint.&nbsp; Since these generally weren&#039;t saved it makes modern varieties quite rare except heavily worn in circulation.</p><p><br /></p><p>Mint sets are the savior for those who like well made gems.&nbsp; Without the sets these coins would be too rare (or nonexistent) to even attempt.&nbsp; But mint sets are not the panacea many believe they are because coins in the sets can be marked heavily or even have been scraped (like the &#039;80-D half) when they were placed in the set.&nbsp; What most people haven&#039;t noticed as they&#039;ve been ignoring the coins over the years is thaty the mint sets have been disappearing.&nbsp; They were assigned almost no value because there are millions where there are dozens of collectors.&nbsp; The prices are so low that it&#039;s profitable for dealers to cut them up for the cash register!&nbsp; People get terrible offers from their sets from dealers so they take them home and toss them in the basement where they are exposed to humidity or floods. (not to mention fire and other calamity).&nbsp; Over the years most of these sets have been totally lost and many of the survivors have degraded.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>It used to be that the 2% of a date that was gemmy was plenty of coins to satisfy the thin market but now it might be only 1% of a much&nbsp; smaller number.&nbsp; This situation can not persist indefinitely.&nbsp; I think the only reason it&#039;s lasted this long is that a lot of the collectors are relatively new and don&#039;t realize that they are running out of time to complete their sets on the cheap.&nbsp; There is already difficulty in obtaining some date mint sets and this isn&#039;t just gems but all of that date and all those denominations.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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