question on wheat cents

[chrisfuccione]

Hi This is Dave a friend of Chris. I have a question that chris and I thought of tonight.....While going through $25.00 worth of wheat cents I noticed that there are not nearly enough "S" mint marks on the East coast. You would think that after 50 or 60 years the distribution of mint marks would have leveled off and be relatively evenly scattered around the country. Does anyone have a plausible explanation for the still skewed distribution?

[gmarguli]

Most likely these coins were taken out of circulation near the mint of origin. Cent rolls are not worth much, but cost a lot to ship across the country. They probably stay near where they were minted (like most coins) for circulation and when they were removed from circulation, there is no real reason to ship them to the other coast.

[chrisfuccione]

Hi This is Dave again.

 

Not counting what collectors take out of circulation there are still an awful lot of these coins around. It just seemed that as they naturally moved around in there first 5 or 10 years the distribution would have evened out.

 

We found about 20 "S's" out of 2500. It just seemed that the laws of natural distribution were being seriously skewed.

 

Oh well.. thats just the way it goes then.

 

Thanks

[Wihlborg]

Dave,

It could also be that the s mint coins are considered better date coins and are hoarded as soon as they are found. I bet you will be keeping the 20 you found right? S mint coins don't make it to the east coast too much to begin with so if enough people have done this over the years it would make them even harder to find.

 

John

 

[jtryka]

Remember too, that not all circulated for 50 years. My guess is that a lot of wheat cents were already out of circulation 30 years ago. And for the record, it's really hard to get P mint issues here in the west coast even after a long time in circulation! My guess is that you open a roll of pennies out here and at least 40 of them will be D or S (though S aren't too common, you still run into a few S coins from the late 60s and early 70s every so often). Ironically enough, for coins that don't circulate (like Kennedys), the distribution is far more even. I completed a circulated clad set of all dates and mints with just 10 rolls from the bank. I have seen far more 1999-P halves than 1999-P state quarters! Now I wonder why that is the case?

[GP_]

last bag I went through had lots of S mints in it, of course I did buy it from someone on the west coast. I put all the extras back into circulation after filling my albums, so you never know, you might see more soon, I put about $100 worth back into circ