Many Unused 1961 1962 Pennies Showing Up In My Change!

Wow, neat!

That is certainly an anomaly in my opinion... perhaps it was a local dump and your local franchise and those customers use the same bank? Interesting!

It would be an interesting experiment to mark some zincolns, roll them, deposit or cash them at the bank and see if any come back...

Wow! Being born in 61 that's pretty darn cool.

Pretty cool finds. Maybe some kind of collection or change jar dump?

Those look like some nice coins! I don't know if you check for varieties but there are several doubled dies for the 62's and of course lots of RPM's for the 61 D's, if you are interested in looking.

62 P doubled dies link. http://varietyvista.com/01b%20LC%20...O%201962.htm

61D RPMs link. http://varietyvista.com/02b%20LC%20...20(1-39).htm

62D RPMs link. http://varietyvista.com/02b%20LC%20...%201962D.htm

I know they probably have no value, but as just a casual collector, just seeing an old copper penny with the original finish is cool enough! :-) I'm not really into looking for varieties, as usually any standard coin I find is too worn to see them, but maybe I'll look closer at these, as a sort of lesson.

No. If the Mint had giant stockpiles of old pennies sitting around since the 1960s, they would have released them decades ago, rather than mint more. The Mint itself doesn't really have a lot of "storage" for coins to hide in - they tend to get shipped as soon as they are produced.

Likewise the Federal Reserve, which is the organization that distributes coins from mints to banks, doesn't have giant stockpiles of old coins sitting around "just in case". They wouldn't have wasted everybody's time requesting extra coins be made if they already had plenty in stock. Distributing money is their job, if they had it, they'd have distributed it, decades ago.

In 1973, there was a "penny shortage", when surging copper prices caused the Mint to stop producing pennies. This is the same copper price surge that prompted the aluminium penny experiment in 1974. But people then, as now, had "run out of pennies" with some stores issuing penny scrip as substitutes. If anyone in the Mint or Fed had a ready cache of pennies sitting around from 1961, they'd probably have come out then, and not waited until now.

Finally, that this wasn't a "mint release" is demonstrated by the mixture of mintmarks in your mini-hoard. Freshly minted coins are almost always homogeneously single-mintmark, and not a mixture of both mintmarks. The only people who are likely to have large stockpiles of mint-fresh coins from both mintmarks are collectors and hoarders.

I had purchased several hundred dollars of Canadian pennies a few years back. I searched thru them over time and had over $200 worth of zinc pennies I had no use for. Since no one else wanted them I cashed them in at a couple local CoinStars.

Over the next year I did notice getting back more Canadian pennies in change around the area than normal. Whether any were from my dump or not I cannot say for sure but was it coincidence?

I don't know how CoinStar deals with collected coins once they end up in their hands but I have to think they have some sort of regional processing center here in the Phoenix area and resells their coins locally. Since Canadian zinc pennies are mechanically indistinguishable from US pennies they would just be mixed in together. Assuming that the coins were redistributed locally, it makes sense that a somewhat significant amount of Canadian pennies would be in local circulation.

It's my understanding that CoinStars are emptied by the armoured car companies, who would redistribute the collected coins back to the banks, or direct to the larger retailers. Coins from CoinStars are likely to get mixed in with freshly minted coins from the Mint at the armoured car company distribution centres, as those same companies are likely also contracted by the Federal Reserve to handle the fresh coinage distribution.

These companies make the most profit if they can ship coins the shortest distance possible, since more distance = more fuel = more costs. So locally sourced coins are always going to be preferred over importing fresh coinage from the Mints or surplus coinage from elsewhere in the country.