I've just finished noodling through almost $300' worth of 10c coins, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the mintage of the 1994 10c coin was much lower than the mint says it was.
The reported mintage is 43.7 million, but I only find it about 2/5 as often as the 1993 10c, which has a reported mintage of 23.1 million, and about 2/3 as often as the 1990 10c, which has a reported mintage of 25.0 million.
Depending on which figure you believe, the final mintage of this coin seems to be around 10-15 million, not the 43.7 million claimed by the mint.
Has anyone else noticed this discrepancy?
All the other coins minted in the early 1990s have an attrition rate of about 70-85%, but the 1994 10c coin has an attrition rate of 94%, which is higher than every other year except 1985.
Either people are hoarding the 1994 10c coin en masse, or the mint has drastically overestimated how many it actually made.
Here's a graph to put this in perspective:
The years on the left-hand side of the graph should be those with very low mintages (which indicates hoarding), or those that were minted a long time ago (which indicates normal wear and tear).
The 1994 10c coin should be in the middle of the graph, near the 1990, 1992 and 1993 releases, not out on the far left edge, near the 1966, 1971 and 1973 releases.
A coin released in 1994 should not have the same attrition rate as those released 20 or 30 years earlier, unless it is very rare, so I cannot see how it's possible for it to have a mintage of more than half of what the mint claims.
Has anyone else noticed that the attrition rate for the 1994 10c coin is almost unbelievably high?
The 1989 figure also looks sus, but not as sus as the 1994 one.
... I am trying to corner the market.
Posted 03/01/2016 08:31 am
