Brinks Pulling Silver? Sure Seems Like They Are

I forgot to ad after " screen out foreign coins " and silver coins

I've wondered the same thing. I've been searching rolls for a couple of years and I don't remember the last time I found silver. I've just about given up, but the pull of the hunt gets me from time to time. I guess I'm an optimist at heart.

I dread Loomis boxes

There is no proof that these companies are culling silver, and they do not own the coin they are handling, so how would this be possible? Besides, no one has been able to provide hard evidence of culling for as long as I've been roll hunting.

There may be more likely probabilities than the Evil Brinks Conspiracy Theory (although I don't rule that one totally out).

Consider... If you live in an "isolated city" area (like Harrisburg PA, Binghamton NY, Plattsburgh NY, Montpelier VT, etc), the overall area you live in - city plus surrounding suburbs - has a pool of circulating coin that's probably pretty stagnant. Major amounts of existing coin don't leave the area, and major amounts of other old coin don't get shipped into the area (unless you have a giant tourist attraction of some kind locally).

Into this stagnant pool of circulating coin, throw a generous number of rabid CRHers with lots of spare time. Inside just a few years, those CRHers will probably have almost totally depleted the local coin pool of silvers.

Many years later, new CRHers (like ME!!) enter the scene. They go through dozens of boxes of halves without ever finding even one measly silver, get very discouraged and (I think naturally) start suspecting the worst of Brinks, etc.

Brinks & etc may or may not be guilty of whatever they are or aren't guilty of. But - I think the discouraging lack of silvers that CRHers face these days is more likely due to the fact that in the 40+ years since the last silver coins were minted, people have removed almost all the silvers from the coin in circulation.

Don't misconstrue what I'm saying - silvers are still out there and you can still find them. But - there are very few of them and the frequency with which you'll find them is almost nil (like my having searched over $20K of halves and finding zero silvers). Circulating silver American coins are an endangered species and they're getting closer and closer to disappearing with every passing year.

If my experiences are even remotely close to typical, don't plan on building a big silver coin collection out of what you'll find in circulation in the USA today.

I thought the same thing back around 1980 or so. I'm finding more silver now than I did then. It's constantly being dumped back into the system. Belief in silver culling is a bit like religion to me. Either there's faith, or there's not.

Fistfull, I guess your 'faith' perspective is one way to look at it but understand that the same principle would apply to someone that's new to roll searching. They don't have proof that there's silver in bank boxes. They have faith based on others experience and common sense that boxes from the bank will have silver.

I don't really look at it that way. Even though there is no proof they will find silver, I wouldn't call it faith because there are enough experiences to reasonably assume it to be true. Same thing with the brinks dimes in my area.

I've discussed this many times. I believe there is some 'culling' but its clear that Brinks, the company does not cull silver. There are many people who are successful with brinks. I personally have been successful with the brinks halves. There are regions/areas that people are reporting no silver. Most of the time, it's someone new to CRHing and they've looked at a few boxes and come to the conclusion that someone is culling them. I've searched between 22 and 27 boxes of clear brinks dimes. That's at least 110,000 dimes without a single silver rimmed silver dime. That's enough for me to reasonably conclude that someone is culling the silver rimmed dimes before I get them. For the record, I've searched probably 50 boxes of S&S wrapped and would say I average about 1 per box. YMMV

There is no distributors that I know of that cull silver. It's all luck, and as someone else mentioned, local areas have local distribution... if one person like me needs to move coin out of his turf, and decides to take a road trip to your turf, you might be going through 20-30-40-50 boxes of my rejects.