Why Aren't People Hoarding Memorial Cents By Now?

I know there were/are people hoarding the older Memorial cents for the copper content. Of course, it is illegal to melt them down and has been since 2006.

For the Zincoln Memorial cents part of 1982/1983-2008 the coins don't hold up too well.

-MV

I've hoarded my fair share! Of course I've been roll searching and buying for many years only keeping the best of the best. The vast majority of what's left out there are crappy. You can even buy pristine mint sets and the Lincoln(s) is beat-up, stained and/or spotted. 99+% of the BU's you find (either in circ or from dealers) are the same. If they aren't, they are poorly struck, missing detail or covered in plating blisters.....except for VERY few.

So, yes, there are billions of them as Groszy points out (but most of them are crap). This is the same attitude dealers have had for decades now. Really, every dealer I've talked to has little to no interest in Memorials because there are "billions". The reality is, there are billions of low-end to mid-range coins and, at most, only thousands worthy of being in a serious, high-end collection.

Until you get serious about collecting Memorial Cents and spend a lot of time searching for high-end gems, you won't get what I'm saying.

Pennies as money is an anachronism.

Half the country already has a five gallon jug of mostly pennies and mostly memorial pennies so you could say they're already hoarding them.

Give it a few years and someone is going to notice that finding a true well made Gem 1984-D is next to impossible and then people will pay attention to them. Another 50 years after this and so many will have been destroyed through various means that almost any Memorial cent might be worth a little bit. Maybe ten or twenty will even buy a candy bar.

I'm not sure if hoarders of memorial cents would see any measureable gains in their lifetimes since the mintage are so high. Sure copper cents are worth more than a cent but you have to realize that they are not pure copper (refining costs would eat up any gains) and the fact that it is illegal to melt them.

I don't collect them because I think that they will be around for a while more. Also, seems like more trouble than its worth to me. :/

Yeah, my alleged hoard hovers around the same value. It is a matter of personal opinion I supposed.


Hush your mouth!

Here's some shots of my Memorial roll set. I sort them with the worst examples in the top of the tube. That way, when I find a new prospect, I can compare easily to what I have, then decide which one to toss. Doing this for years has made all of my rolls gem quality.

These are old pictures, only part of my set, you can see the lower years are not all there and completed....it's much different today. I got to the point where for certain years, I have given up trying to find better coins. I started putting dots on top of those tubes so while I am searching I can skip those years - unless an extreme eye-popper came up in the 68-69 range (very, very rare).