Five Dollars In Pennies From The Bank And Not A Single One Before 1982

About 20% of the pennies in circulation are copper. Your ten rolls were from a larger grouping that had these removed.

It used to be very common to get contaminated samples of this sort in every denomination. Up until 1965 every coin was screened again and again for rare dates.

I guess I should look on the bright side, I did manage to get a ton of MS post 1982-2009 in them. I'm still sorting them out now. To find the best of each. Is there anything specific I should keep an eye out for? I'll be posting some of them in the coin grading forum in a minute

Yep, the rush to corral all the circulating Cu is definitely on.
It is 1965 all over again. Copper is the new silver. Grab it while you can.
Remember, he who dies with the most coins wins dies, so you
might as well leave your inheritors a hefty surprise.

5 rolls is nothing. That's not even a micro-sample. lol You need to buy entire boxes or even 5000 ct bags. Some of my best coins came from those giant bags that were taken directly out of counting machines. People dump their change hoards in those - I had some amazing scores!

Especially considering most of them came like that from the mint. LOL

If not that, then black spots & stains, overused dies, and rough handling right out of the stamping machine shoots. When you're making 100's of billions, quality is not critical and the results speak for themselves.....99% of uncirculated memorial cents are below MS-65. In my experience, even the mint set coins are generally 60-64.

I think a lot of these coins will end up in the garbage stream and even poison the garbage dumps if no effort is made to recall them. Especially the zincolns but they will all be in extreme danger of being tossed in the trash over the next twenty years.

I average about 25 Gems per year since 1972. They come out of pocket change but most come from rolls of circulated coin and a few from rolls of BU that sometimes are given to me by the bank. Most come out of circulated rolls though and are usually dated within the previous three years. Once in a while an older one comes up but it's quite unusual for me to see one over ten years old in this area. Very few coins sit in storage over three years around here. It takes only about three weeks of circulation on average to knock a Gem down to AU-58.

I see lots of BU's but very few Gems. With pennies even BU rolls of recent vintage often will have problems with every coin as well as tarnish on every single coin. Older cents didn't always have the tarnish problems but they had other severe deficiencies.

Don't rush out and look for Gems now. Most cents from 1965 to date are easy enough to find in MS-65 that you don't need to pay a high price. Indeed, you can flesh out much of a Memorial cent collection going through dealers stock and paying 25c to a dollar per. About 25 of them will be tough but still you should be able to locate them with effort and mint sets to check. Unless you have high standards I doubt you'd have a cost over three or four dollars for any of them. Keep in mind though that they are only available because people aren't collecting them so if they start the coins will get much harder to find.

A lot of these are even fairly "common" in MS-67 in mint sets. There aren't many mint sets left but nobody wants them so they accumulate in dealer stock. They have risen in price (especially the old ones) in the last three years but they are still just about dirt cheap. Most dealers don't mind you looking throgh their sets as long as you buy a few at retail price.