Wheat Cent Population Census

Cbass, these hoards of wheats being dumped is one of the reasons cent roll hunting still exists. Without a continuing flow of wheat cents being added from circulation, the combination of newly minted cents and CRH pulls would drive the circulating wheat population down exponentially.

Now I'm not saying that dumped collections are the ONLY reason, just anyone with a coin jar containing a wheat or two cashing it in is contributing to a new pool of potential finds. They are out there, but not forever. We will reach the peak wheat crisis someday, but fortunately Wheaties are constantly being fed into circulation...

The proof for our replenishment theory is the difference between actual find rates and the projected normal attrition at a fixed rate. There's a huge difference. BStrauss3 and I figured that in a perfect world where there was no hoarding or collection dumps and the wheat population depreciated at a fixed rate, by now there should be 1 wheat per 4000 cents.

As you can see by my poll, that is definitely not the case.

Absolutely... I suspect if we had true historical data the find rate would have drifted down until the advent of the coinstar type machines made it feasible to replenish the pot from everone's coin jars. ESPECIALLY the cent hoarders in a coffee can.

The truth is, there is no VERIFIABLE data for the replenishment, it is just a hypothesis. There is nothing else I can think of that would cause the Wheat cent find rates to be abnormally high EXCEPT replenishment. Any other logical theories would surprise me.

And for our other data on this, it can be found on my thread called "I got a solid box of 2013s. Now what?" Could someone post a link? I haven't quite figured out how to do it on my tablet...

Real interesting stuff BStrauss and I came up with.

So far, the weighted average is a little over 10 LWC's per box, for all respondents.