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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;lehmansterms, post: 3448737, member: 80804&quot;]I ran an antique/used furniture store from the early 70&#039;s through the early 90&#039;s. Until the widespread accessibility of ATM&#039;s and the 24/7 convenience they created made standing in line seem ridiculous, I&#039;d interact with one or more of the tellers at our branch bank across the street from the store every day while depositing the daily proceeds. The regular tellers were all primed to save anything &quot;unusual&quot; for me. So, well into the 80&#039;s it wasn&#039;t at all unusual to get a 90% dollar or two per month this way. Silver halves, &quot;Ikes&quot; and the like were so commonly available to me that I couldn&#039;t always afford to buy them all (at face) The occasional foreign coin (and not just Canadian) which happened to be close enough in size to a US denomination would come along too - often those would be silver of some fineness or another. Odd clutches of $2 bills, etc, might also be offered. </p><p>It wasn&#039;t long after freestanding bank ATM&#039;s became common on urban sidewalks, went into every convenience store, and drive-up ATM kiosks popped up (like Fotomats - remember them?) in many parking lots, that the great majority of friendly little local bank branches closed - so I don&#039;t really know if the supply dried up at that point in the 80&#039;s or not. I suspect that with less hands-on handling of coin at teller stations and the &quot;no coins in ATM or drive-up teller&quot; policies which were soon enacted made the handling of &quot;hard cash&quot; a lot less common for the greatly diminished corps of tellers.</p><p>Of course, prior to the mid 60&#039;s, it wasn&#039;t all that unusual to get zinc/iron &#039;43 cents and the occasional Indian head, buffalo nickels, &quot;Mercury&quot; dimes, standing liberty quarters, walker halves, and even the occasional severely worn Barber in change. </p><p>Pre mid-&#039;60&#039;s pocket change used to be several orders of magnitude more interesting in those days and this probably accounts for some of the demographic &quot;bulge&quot; of collectors which has been diminishing in per-capita participation - but in a rapidly expanding population, so the net effect is not all that different - in recent years. What is different is the general population of coins becoming so incredibly, boringly, stereotypical that it&#039;s amazing that anyone can be drawn into the hobby any more without the prompting of personal involvement and interaction with established collectors.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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