Why Did The SF Mint Stop Minting Circulating Coins?

BStrauss3 hit it on the head. The SF Mint doesn't have the capacity to make a difference for circulation coins like Denver and Philly do. These days they handle things like Proofs to take the load off the main coin factories.

Philadelphia and Denver were able to supply the countries coinage needs (same reason why San Francisco was shut down in 1955) especially once it took the proof coin production off of Philadelphia's hands. Of course in times of unusually high demand it has returned to striking circulation coins, but with no mintmarks. The S mintmark would just encourage hoarding defeating to purpose of adding the S mint back in the meet demand.

Well... technically the S mint has been making business-strike coins for a few years now...

jmkendall you used an oxymoron...politics/experience?

But not for circulation. The last S mintmarked coin actually made for circulation was the 1980 S SBA.

I think a main reason why is simply lack of space at the old mint site for a modern minting facility. Look at the mintages for SF compared to the other mints: usually way, way smaller. At normal operating capacity, SF simply couldn't keep up.

The Mint is in the middle of the city and already takes up the entire block of land its sitting on. To make a worthwhile contribution to the national coinage, they'd need to seriously increase the size of the factory floor. The SF mint can't expand unless it goes underground (not sure how practical doing that would be there) or annexes nearby roads and buildings. This is downtown SF we're talking here; that wouldn't be cheap.

And the problem with San Francisco is, they can't buy cheap land on the outskirts of the city to build a new mint. They'd have to go so far out of town, they wouldn't technically be in San Francisco any more. Plus, people would perhaps question the wisdom of building important and expensive new federal government infrastructure so close to an earthquake zone, when putting it further away wouldn't make any real difference to the efficiency of the operation.

The San Francisco mint does have room to expand, but they would lose their parking lot. They could expand and still incorporate a parking facility into the expansion. Their current building only covers a little over half of the block with the parking lot behind it.

The Old San Francisco Mint does take up it's entire block.

It's kind of hard to get information on the current mint. Every time you do a search about all you get is information on the old mint. Had some trouble finding out what it's actual address was.