Do Coin Collectors Cause The Mint To Produce Additional Coin

If you want to see how hoarding by the general public affects mintages, look no further than Quarters.

State Quarters = minted by the hundreds of millions for each design. Massively hoarded by the general public until 2008, with millions of BU rolls sold to the public at face value by banks.

Then the bottom falls out of the economy. All the State Quarter hoarders try to cash in their hoards, only to find out their Quarters are worth just face value. Off to the CoinStar machines they went.

And they're still out there. I see BU State Quarters (even from 1999-2001) in my change regularly.

With millions of hoarded State Quarters now back in circulation, is it any wonder why the National Park Quarter mintages are in the gutter?

Highest mintages of these series (as of Sept. 2012)
2000-P Virginia = 943,000,000
2012-D Hawaii Volcanoes = 78,600,000 (8.3% of the previous figure)

Lowest mintages of these series (as of Sept. 2012)
2008-D Oklahoma = 194,600,000
2012-D Acadia N.P. = 21,606,000 (11.1% of the previous figure)

If I have 1,000 Acadia-D Quarters, this means I (one individual) possess one out of every 21,606 of Acadia-D Quarters ever minted.

I want to thank everyone for responding. I didn't think it would generate much of a response. Being fairly new to coin collecting I know I have learned much from the various posts.

With all the talk about CRH I can't help but to try and compare what happened to the pre-65 dimes, quarters, and halves to what is happening to the pre-83 pennies. Although there are literally many billions of pre-83 pennies the effect of people searching them out and keeping them are definitely having an effect on their availability.

There have been threads on other forums about the dwindling retention rates that these coin hunters are encountering. When people try and find pre-65 dimes, halves, and quarters there just isn't a lot of these coins left in circulation.

Both hoarding and the precious metal value of the coins do have an impact on availability.

To lend some credence to what Sel_691 has said, I used to stash change and use accumulated change to help finance family vacation, but I feel strongly that the precious metal value of coinage has had a more dramatic impact the any saving of change for vacations ever had on silver coins.

We will never know how many coins were lost to the melting of coins just for their silver content. The people who were doing that were neither ordinary people nor collectors, but people interested in making a buck.

Low value money content will drive the high value money out of circulation every time.