Junk Bin Pirates Reborn?

[Dave 77]

I was looking through the old forum and found the junk bin pirates thread. I love looking through junk bins and seeing everyone else's finds. I would love to see the thread rise again. Maybe some of you would be willing to participate.
http://realcent.forumco.com/topic.asp?T ... hichpage=1

[uthminsta]

Sure! I'll tell a quick story to hopefully spur others to go out and look!

I constantly dig through the loose coin tub at my local coin shop. Every time I do, there are silver coins which have recently been added. The owners are great friends of mine, so I take them over and say here's your silver. Their response is different each time, but usually includes one ragging on the other about how he needs to stop throwing silver into the junk like that.

Last Saturday, I did that, and the son jokingly tossed a few of them on the desk of the father, then said "Dad, you really gotta quit that. This guy is gonna get them every time! Here, these are yours for always being honest... every... time."

Got some foreign exchange for user AGgressive Metal's foreign exchange business (viewtopic.php?f=30&t=20579)... and the silver was:
1953 Belgium 20 francs - 835 fine, about .214 ounces.
1951 Mexico 25 centavos - 300 fine, about .032 ounces.
1942 Netherlands East Indies tenth gulden - 720 fine, about .029 ounces.
Total "for being honest" comes to .275 ounces of silver.

[frugi]

About 10 years back I would go to one of the local shops (which is a national dealer) on a weekly basis to search through the loose coin bin. I was pulling out foreign copper coins from 1600-1750 by the handful and the occasional silver coin, and sometimes even civil war tokens or storecard tokens, (it was crazy what I was getting by the pound). I think at the time they were charging $7.00/lb. and I was reselling on eBay and at the fleamarket. However, I was able to do this for about a year, until one day one of the jerks who worked there came up to me and told me I was "too old" to make purchases from the loose coin bin. He told me they purposely "seed" the bin with good coins so that kids will find the better coins and find interest in collecting as a hobby. He told me he would sell me what I had found that day, but that I was prohibited from making any future purchases from the coin bin. It made me soooooo pissed off, I have never been back to that place, even to this day, I dislike them, and whenever I have the opportunity I speak negatively about them. Not to mention I also saw one of the employees ripping off a group of nuns with some church gold they had brought in to sell to make money for some restorations to the church. It was large amounts of 18k gold crucifixes, and gold chains, and the guy told them, "nobody really wants the high purity stuff because it is so fragile, so it goes for less"; and then he told them a gold quote much lower than what they paid in general. He took advantage of them, because he knew he could get away with it, perhaps he spotted a sucker when they walked in the door. Awful place though, I should go back now after 10 years and see if those same folks are still there, and see if they still have the loose coin bin. I had forgotten all about it, erased it from my memory until I saw this topic and it all came back.

[ZenOps]

I'm a big kid.

Local foreign treasure bin gets raided by me all the time. I usually sell some silver or something semi-rarish at a discount (local coin dealer needs to make a few bucks afterall, and where else am I going to sell semi-rare not intrinsic?)

He seems to not mind, although I think its an unwritten rule that its no more than a few dollars per day.