2017 Kennedy Half Dollar

That's what I was thinking too. In order to be fairly assured of a full box of unmixed NIFC coins (And we still can't say for sure they are unmixed there may be a few "odd" coins in the rolls somewhere. Can't be sure they are solid without opening ALL of them) you would need to dump MULTIPLE boxes of NIFC coins at the bank so the supply for rolling would be overwhelmingly NIFC coins.

Other possiblity is that since halves don't really circulate, someone dumped ONE box worth, they went to Loomis but they didn't have any other halves to roll and just dumped in the one box worth and rolled it.

For those I wouldn't feel bad. If it was me I would go through them and see what was in there

Problem with that is that the Fed doesn't HAVE NIFC coin in their inventory except for whatever gets dumped at the bank by collectors that purchased them at a premium. And those would most likely be well mixed with other coin. Also if they were lat low they probably would have placed an order for halves with the mint. I'm sure that would have shown up in the numismatic press "Fed ordering half dollars again!". We would have also seen a jump in the mintage figures reported by the mint. I don't believe there is any big jump in mintage for 2017 halves.

Maybe they DID slip something past us. Checking mintage figures and comparing them to previous years the 2017 D mintage is about 1 million coins higher than it should be, and the 2018's are running about 2 1/2 million coins or so higher than normal for both P and D.

2014 P 2.5 M D 2.1 M
2015 P 2.3 M D 2.3 M
2016 P 2.1 M D 2.1 M
2017 P 1.8 M D 2.9 M
2018 P 5.4 M D 4.8 M and the years isn't over yet.

Now the NIFC coin mintages have been what was needed to fill the mint sets and the roll and bag sales. If they are still NIFC why the big jump in mintages? I don't thing sales of mint sets, bags, or rolls have suddenly doubled.

Agreed. The Fed ran low and placed an order with the Mint.

The half dollars being NIFC was not mandated like it was for the dollar coins. The lack of demand made it de facto NIFC.

None of this makes sense. The Feds were low? I wasn't aware these were stockpiled for circulation use? And I can't see there being a high demand from the sales of sets. I haven't bought a current mint set in a long time as they are bloated with dollars and quarters I don't care about and not to mention overpriced.

But the question remains. Who is using that many halves to the point where the feds need to replenish their stockpiles?

The casino useage is interesting because most if not all casinos use cash vouchers for winnings now. At least the dozen of them I’ve been to do.

Something really odd is up here. What could possibly spiking the demand and causing the two mints to produce over 10 million halves in less than nine months?

Some odd things have been showing up of late in our CRH threads. Three months ago, someone got an entire brand new box of 1995-P halves:
http://goccf.com/t/321385

And now we have boxes of 2017 coins showing up and an increased production of 2018 coins. I'm willing to bet some people have probably found entire boxes of 2018 coins by this point.