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Something I posted in another thread reminded me of this lost tale from two hacks ago.
My husband works in a coin store and also collects coins as a hobby. One of the questions which always make him cringe inwardly is "Are these worth anything?" When he looks to see what "these" are, it is almost always a huge heap of circulated coins belonging to a recently dead relative.
Now coins are always worth something. They are money, after all. For instance, unless you mutilate it horribly, you can count on a quarter to be worth 25 cents. If it turns out you are lucky enough to have a somewhat unusual or old quarter it might be worth more than that, say 30 cents or maybe even 50 cents. The quarters rare enough to be worth thousands are just that. Rare. As in "very unlikely to be found in grandpa's accumulated pocket change."
OK. Now that I've set the background, here is the actual story.
My husband was working at the coin shop when a guy came in with a large jar of older circulated wheatback pennies (the design on the reverse had two stalks of wheat for decoration instead of the Lincoln Memorial; it was the prior design to the one we have now) and asked the fateful question, "Hey. My grandpa kept these for years. Are they worth anything?" The boss gave them a quick glance and decided to buy the lot for face value plus 5%. The guy was convinced he was being ripped off and argued a bit, but was told that was the final deal, finally accepted the price offered and left.
My husband got the fun job of cherry picking the pennies. He put the ones they wanted to sell in holders or the 10 for a dollar bin and set the rest aside to roll up and deposit at the bank as cash.
That bank deposit turned out to be a huge job. My husband was rolling wheatback pennies every day for two weeks whenever he wasn't busy with other things. He'd come home smelling like copper. Blech.
He was also the one who had to go to the bank and make the daily deposits. He felt bad about going in every day with these multiple rolls of pennies, so he felt like he needed to apologize a bit and explain why he was doing that. The tellers were fine about it, of course. They even got to joking with him about it.
So one day he was making the daily deposit with one of the last batches of penny rolls, when one of the tellers told him that some of their commercial customers were buying pennies for their tills at the bank and the bank was starting to sell off the wheatback rolls. A couple of customers even came back and remarked on the cool old pennies.
My husband didn't think much of that until he started noticing people coming into his store asking, "I got a whole roll of these old pennies at the bank. Are they worth anything?"
My husband works in a coin store and also collects coins as a hobby. One of the questions which always make him cringe inwardly is "Are these worth anything?" When he looks to see what "these" are, it is almost always a huge heap of circulated coins belonging to a recently dead relative.
Now coins are always worth something. They are money, after all. For instance, unless you mutilate it horribly, you can count on a quarter to be worth 25 cents. If it turns out you are lucky enough to have a somewhat unusual or old quarter it might be worth more than that, say 30 cents or maybe even 50 cents. The quarters rare enough to be worth thousands are just that. Rare. As in "very unlikely to be found in grandpa's accumulated pocket change."
OK. Now that I've set the background, here is the actual story.
My husband was working at the coin shop when a guy came in with a large jar of older circulated wheatback pennies (the design on the reverse had two stalks of wheat for decoration instead of the Lincoln Memorial; it was the prior design to the one we have now) and asked the fateful question, "Hey. My grandpa kept these for years. Are they worth anything?" The boss gave them a quick glance and decided to buy the lot for face value plus 5%. The guy was convinced he was being ripped off and argued a bit, but was told that was the final deal, finally accepted the price offered and left.
My husband got the fun job of cherry picking the pennies. He put the ones they wanted to sell in holders or the 10 for a dollar bin and set the rest aside to roll up and deposit at the bank as cash.
That bank deposit turned out to be a huge job. My husband was rolling wheatback pennies every day for two weeks whenever he wasn't busy with other things. He'd come home smelling like copper. Blech.
He was also the one who had to go to the bank and make the daily deposits. He felt bad about going in every day with these multiple rolls of pennies, so he felt like he needed to apologize a bit and explain why he was doing that. The tellers were fine about it, of course. They even got to joking with him about it.
So one day he was making the daily deposit with one of the last batches of penny rolls, when one of the tellers told him that some of their commercial customers were buying pennies for their tills at the bank and the bank was starting to sell off the wheatback rolls. A couple of customers even came back and remarked on the cool old pennies.
My husband didn't think much of that until he started noticing people coming into his store asking, "I got a whole roll of these old pennies at the bank. Are they worth anything?"
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