Fed Boxes Of Halves

i ordered a box from a wachovia, took a week to order. when the manager gave it to me, he said, here you go...straight from the fed. String and Son wrapped box.

I have performed extensive research on this exact topic. I talked to the Federal Reserve in Washington DC, the Treasury Department, and the head of the Pennsylvania banking commission in my state. The best answer I have received to date is that new mintages are split. Some go out in bags to federal reserve banks, Illinois, San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and are then subbed out to rolling companies. The others are rolled by the men and sold to the public by the box or you could buy them by the bag with the exception of this year and next year! Next year, 2010 there will be no mintage of nickels or dimes, just pennies.

Your local bank orders boxes from federal reserve banks in their regions. I put about 45 hours of investigative work into this three weeks ago and nobody can tell me the exact chain of possession.

Hope this helps!

I posted this on another thread where a guy was askling about ordering boxes from his bank, but Ill post it here for you guys too..

Most people would be surprised to know that even some of the biggest banks do not deal with the FED all that much. I used to work for a Bank. I don't wana name the bank in case I am about to violate some security protocol, but I will say it was one of the top US banks. I didn't work in a branch, but in a department called the "Money room". We were in the same building as the call center. We dealt with large customers like department stores and Malls and of course branches. You know how sometime you will see a Brinks truck, or some other armored carrier truck at the local grocery store? Well what the truck is doing is picking up the deposits from that store. The truck then takes the total deposit, cash, coin, and checks not to the bank, but to a Brinks office where the cash and coin is counted, wrapped and strapped. The cash and coin is kept in the possession of brinks. Brinks then delivers the checks and a receipt for the cash to us in the Bank money room. I won't go into detail about how accounts are credited, not important here. Point is, we hardly see cash. When a store needs cash, say they want 5k in ones we put in an order to Brinks and tell brinks to deliver the $$ to the store. Same thing with the branches though. When they reach a certain amount of $$ in their vaults they will have Brinks take some of it off their hands. When a branch needs money, they call the money room and we have brinks bring them some. We do have a small amount of cash in the money room, but not millions like someone would think. On a good day maybe 100k? but that was even high.. And when we did need cash, we got if from our carrier. Point of all this is, we didn't have an open line with the FED like most would think, only a few times a quarter did we have an opportunity to order money from the FED. And we got whatever the fed had at the time to deliver.

Point is, when you go into a branch and ask to purchase a specific type of coin, it is really hard for the bank to accommodate you. Say someone walked into a branch at my bank and requested a box of 2009 cents. That teller would have to pass on the request to the branch manager who deals with the money room. Then the person from the money room would have to call brinks and ask if brinks had any boxes fresh from the mint. (this is assuming that brinks has recently gotten boxes of coin from the fed and still have some in stock). And also keep in mind that when banks and armored carriers inventory coin, they don't say that have 50 boxes of 2009, 50 boxes of 2010, they just have 100 boxes of pennies. So next someone from brinks would have to go into their vault and look for a mint box. Then the people from the armored carrier would have to be nice enough to set that box aside and make sure it is included in the next shipment to your branch..

So you see, it is a process. And I'm not saying it is impossible to make a request, but it is unlikely that the average bank will be so willing to do this for you. Especially if it's only one person asking. Chances are if you go to a bank that will get you a box of whatever with no problem, then that bank probably has 10 other people asking for the same thing and has a system set up to make the boxes more available to the branches. I know tellers at my bank would politely tell you to take a hike if you asked them for a box of coin.


Im my case, when coin came from the fed it came in bags and it was up to the carriers to wrap it...most of the time.