Cent Hoarding Going Mainstream

Three questions on any "make money" idea:

Is it practical? Wearing out a vehicle collecting and getting rid of tons of cents, not to mention securely storing them, doesn't sound practical to me.

Is it profitable? Making a few dollars a week while pursuing your coin searching hobby is OK, but if you're doing it for profit, remember to factor in mileage, etc.

Is it scalable? Even with a machine, you need to have huge quantities to search, and make enough to pay minimum wage help. Otherwise all you're doing is taking yourself away from something else.

I know its fun searching, and have done many cent boxes myself, but please enlighten me on how you're making good money here.

50lbs worth of copper cents is $72.93 and worth $171.75 in copper.

If I use the liberal estimate of 20% coppers per box and the ambitious job of searching through 2 boxes per week every week, it would take approximately 7 weeks to do this. Then if I make the dubious assumption that somebody is dumb enough to pay the entire $171.75 for your cents, after $20 fees and $15 shipping...you've made about $64. This would equate to a little over $1 per day and this was using all very unlikely numbers. Chances are you're finding less than 20%, searching less than 2 boxes per week and selling for far less than 171.75....and probably bringing in about 30 cents per day.

I think it's a moot point anyway. If the government removed the ban on melting copper they would certainly set up "cooper sorters" similar to what they did with silver. The government will take care of removing most of the pre '82 cents before they legalize melting to the public, IMO.

Ok I have gone and sorted my 3 small piggy banks of pre-82 pennies. I now have a jar for those ones. It only took like 15 minutes or so but I think I have like 200+ pennies just from what I already had.

Oh and my fingers are dirty now. LOL

The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition you get.

Remember tanning beds? Shell out a grand for a bed or two, and you're on your way to becoming a tanning tycoon. Only problem is, so are six other people on your block.

It doesn't take much skill to pull copper cents. A pair of buckets and a $10 scale, and you're in biz!

What bigfred said. It is all about lower barriers to entry.

Look at it this way, when people were hoarding the silver from change in the later half of the 60's, they were basically doing what penny hoarders are doing now. They were getting stuff cheaper than melt.

However, if they didn't immediately sell and move on, they had to sit on their money until the Hunt Brothers came along.

But what if they didn't sell at the top then? Then they had to hold onto their silver longer, up until the last few years to really make it worth while.

The opportunity cost of that move is the huge returns in the stock market in the 80's and 90's.

Heck, even from 65/67 to 79, that's more than a decade. Those years they could have parked their money in something else!


I'm not saying don't diversify. By all means, hoard some copper pennies, but don't hold onto them forever. There will be better business opportunities if making a buck is what you are concerned about.

They are prolly sold loose, by count. Once refiners enter the picture, that will change to weight.

I had to go and buy a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi wine to get a bottle to put my coppers in a few weeks ago. I hadn't drunk that stuff since high school. And the price has doubled in the last 15 years So far I have 20lbs from casually sorting over the last few years. I guess I better step my game up if I want to compete with the pros.