Where Do All The Coins Go?

The coins are everywhere.
Businesses and Banks. And most homes have jar or box or bags full of coins.
And then there are the lost coins. I also metal detect and I have found coins
almost everywehere I have searched. Schools, parks, home site/yards, beaches,
churches, ball parks/sports field and many other places.

I think I read somewhere, that the government thinks there are more coins lost
or buried then there is in circulation.

Also don't forget the coin collectors, there could be 100 milion people collecting
U.S. coins. My collection in this past year has increased by 2000+ coins.
I know there are collectors that have many many more coins than I do.

Yeah, it's a staggering number and numbers that high can be difficult to comprehend.

I don't have a solid answer but think of the hundreds of thousands (or more?) of retail stores, bank branches, restaurants, bars, service centers, vending machines (for other than cents), tip jars, etc. that use cents on a daily basis and I imagine that accounts for most of them. That's why cents exist, after all. And everyone in the country (on average) has a certain # in their pockets, dressers, cars. 312 million people in the U.S. x 100 pennies/person is another one of those big numbers...31.2 billion.

Then there are people like myself with hundreds of dollars worth of cents in buckets and jars, and...

I believe the mint does take coins out of circulation periodically. Take the 1943 steel cents for instance. The mint collected large numbers of them and destroyed them. The U.S. Mint says the lifespan of a coin is ~25 years (although I suspect Zincolns don't last that long with normal circulation). Not sure if there's a process where old/mutilated coins are destroyed or not; I'm sure someone on here does.

Pennies are less than worthless now and most people are fully aware of this. It takes more than a penny's worth of time and effort to pick up a penny so people leave them be. Some people just discard all their pennies as being a waste of time. Then there are the accidental losses caused by getting sucked up in vacuums or dropped in a garbage can. Zinc coins lost in the ground can completely dissolve and contaminate the ground in just a couple of years.

Several large trucks were filled by loaders with coins scooped up from the base of Niagra Falls years ago when it was shut down for unspection and "cleaning". Even silver coins could be half eaten away by the churning of debris and coins swirling in the water. Zinc would have a very poor survival rate since most of the coins would tend to be carried away and dissolved (oxidized).

It's only natural that a coin worth less than nothing that costs three times face value to mint would have a very poor survival rate. Look at the copper penny. These remain about 20% of the cents in circulation despite getting pulled out by hoarders. This is because the zinc coins are disappearing at such a high rate. The low mintages are reflective of the fact that pennies are becoming obsolete just like the entire currency system. "Cash" doesn't work well any longer so people switch to alternative means of rendering payment.

I always look at it the other way round. How do we manage to have enough coins available for circulation. 427 billion cents sounds like a lot but as Superdave said that is only $28.50 worth each for 150 million people. But we have over 300 million people so cut that down to $14.25 And that is over a FIFTY year period which works out to 29 cents per person per year or a little more than 1 cent for every two weeks. So if on average each person loses, destroys, or hoards more than 1 cent every TWO WEEKS, the entire 427 billion cents disappears. I worked it out one time and if each average four person household manages to get rid of one coin per week the entire annual output of the mint is consumed each year and has to be replaced. ONE coin per week! (Got a roll of cents? That is your coin quota for the year for the whole family. A bag of cents is twice your family quota for the entire fifty year period.) So it always makes me wonder how we manage to have enough coins to carry on commerce.