The Future Canadian Vacation Project

[hammerrob]

President's Day 2 week update. Somehow we just didn't get around to posting last weekend, so this is a double week.

Week1:

Sorting take: 24 cents / 24%, including 1937 (pre-40, yay!)

Penny Arcade take: 30 Cents Canadian, Brazil 50 Centavos, 7 Eurocents

Find of Week: Brazil 50 Centavos, it's about the same diameter as a quarter, but much chunkier with some nice edge lettering (see pic):

[hammerrob]

President's Day 2 week update (continued from previous post).

Week2:

Sorting take: 23 cents / 23%, including 1945. Not a good couple weeks for nickels and dimes!

Penny Arcade take: 65 Cents Canadian, Mexico 11 Pesos, Philippines 1 Piso, 4 Eurocents

Find of Week: Canada 2005 'V' nickel, 60th anniversary of the end of WWII:

[hammerrob]

Pretty decent sorting week (found another common pre-40 cent), and the Penny Arcade was pretty good for Canadian. We just didn't find anything very special for pictures.

Sorting take: 28 cents / 28%, including 34 and 55D ... Nickels - 1952, sent back to the sorter

Penny Arcade take: 75 Cents Canadian, 2 Eurocents

Find of Week: We see so many of these Eurocents that we've never bothered to photo one. This one has a nice ship on it ... so there's that. It represents Greece (who all of Europe is soooo glad they are in the Eurozone!):

[hammerrob]

For sorting our copper perctantage was good, but otherwise nothing was going on. The penny arcade was really good this week, at least compared to results lately!

Sorting take: 27 cents / 27%, ... Nickels - 1956, sent back to the sorter

Penny Arcade take: $1.35, including first loonie since July, Argentina 5 Pesos

Find of Week: We've been doing this a long time now and this is first coin we've found from Argentina .. seems hard to believe! Nice Ship:

[hammerrob]

My wife had a couple different shopping runs for us to make today, so we made it a double week. This first attempt was pretty awful:

Sorting take: 24 cents / 24%, including 1951 ... Nickels - 46 and 48D, sent back to the sorter

Penny Arcade take: Totally shut out

Find of Week: This was actually found sorting for our second run. This 38 Nickel is the first one we've found!

[hammerrob]

Second round was a little better, you already saw the 38 Nickel we found sorting, but we also found a 40S that we didn't have yet. Two holes in our Dansco album filled in one week!

Fun Fact: We're filling Dansco albums with the Nickels and Dimes we find. After filling 2 Nickel holes today we are left to find:

38DS, 39DS, 42DS, 43DS, 44DS, 45DS, 46S, 48S, 49S, 50PD, 51DS, 52D, 53S

I don't expect we'll have another day filling two holes again.



Sorting take: 24 cents / 24%, including 46S ... Nickels - 38, 40S, sent back to the sorter 57D, 48, 58D, 41

Penny Arcade take: No Canadian, but 5 India Rupees, 1 GB Penny, 1 GB 5 Pence

Find of Week: 40S Nickel:

[plus1hdcp]

Congrats on filling 2 spots

I'm down to only needing the 50D. I'm sure there are many other books which are missing this one too. Keep up the search.

[hammerrob]

plus1hdcp said:

I'm down to only needing the 50D. I'm sure there are many other books which are missing this one too. Keep up the search.

Wow ... very nice! I think my son will be well out of college before we're down to just missing the 50D!

[hammerrob]

Forgot to post this last weekend. It was a good week for sorting pennies, but that's about it!

Sorting take: 35 cents / 35%, including 70S, 44, 45

Penny Arcade take: No Canadian, Ecuador 10 Centavos

Find of Week: Nothing remarkable, really, but the 10 Centavos:

[JadeDragon]

Pretty decent sorting week (found another common pre-40 cent), and the Penny Arcade was pretty good for Canadian. We just didn't find anything very special for pictures.

Sorting take: 28 cents / 28%, including 34 and 55D ... Nickels - 1952, sent back to the sorter

Penny Arcade take: 75 Cents Canadian, 2 Eurocents

Find of Week: We see so many of these Eurocents that we've never bothered to photo one. This one has a nice ship on it ... so there's that. It represents Greece (who all of Europe is soooo glad they are in the Eurozone!):

Gotta watch for that to add to the Coin Navy.

[hammerrob]

Today sorting wasn't so good, but it was the first really good day at the Penny Arcade in a long time.

Sorting take: 18 cents / 18%, including 71S, Canada 1998

Penny Arcade take: .76 Canadian, 20 Eurocents, $1.25 Aruba, Bahamas 2 Cents, GB 7 Pence, Costa Rica 20 Colones

Find of Week: Costa Rica 20 Colones, really huge coin. Current exchange rate is 534 Colones to the US Dollar, so this big sucker is worth less than 4 Cents US!:

[hammerrob]

Pretty decent sorting week (found another common pre-40 cent), and the Penny Arcade was pretty good for Canadian. We just didn't find anything very special for pictures.

Sorting take: 28 cents / 28%, including 34 and 55D ... Nickels - 1952, sent back to the sorter

Penny Arcade take: 75 Cents Canadian, 2 Eurocents

Find of Week: We see so many of these Eurocents that we've never bothered to photo one. This one has a nice ship on it ... so there's that. It represents Greece (who all of Europe is soooo glad they are in the Eurozone!):

Gotta watch for that to add to the Coin Navy.

Damn ... a coin navy ... that's brilliant, wish I thought of that before we traded of a whole naval fleet!

[hammerrob]

Sorting was perhaps the worst ever (both rolls of pennies were all 2015s), but we got pretty good variety at the Penny Arcade.

Sorting take: 0 cents / 0%, first 2016 dime!

Penny Arcade take: .75 Canadian, 6 Eurocents, 1 India Rupee, Bahamas 25 Cents, GB 1 Penny, Mexico 3 Pesos, Ecuador 25 Centavos

Find of Week: Bahamas 25 Cents, nice looking coin, and another addition to the 'coin navy':

[hammerrob]

Good week all around, maybe a little light on Canadian, but made up for it with free US $ from the Penny Arcade. It was apparently jammed up with some extra change.

Sorting take: 34 cents / 34%, including 45, 50, Canada 86, 05 .... Nickels 40, 56

Penny Arcade take: .25 Canadian, 5 Eurocents, Aruba 25 Cents, Jamaica 1 Dollar, Netherlands Antilles 10 Cents, Mexico 2 Pesos, US $2.10

Find of Week: Netherlands Antilles 10 Cents, love the design on this coin:

[hammerrob]

Two weeks in a row now the TD Bank Penny Arcade has been out of service. Turns out that nationwide they've taken them all out of service due to counting inaccuracies. The story I read online says they don't know when they will have them back online. So, until they bring them back we are out of business. It would really suck if they replace the old machines with something where we can't access the magnet. That would put us out of business permanently!

[68Camaro]

My experience is that there is nothing wrong with the machines - at least the newer ones. And they test them twice a day as it is. There can be issues with the chute getting installed incorrectly or jammed, such that not all of the coins get into the machine (I've been the beneficiary of that more than a few times.) And I've seen people forget to pick up coins from the reject slot, or forget to restart the machine after it stopped, and walk away leaving uncounted money in it (another thing I've been the beneficiary of a time or two).

I generally know exactly how much I'm putting into it and it normally counts right.

I'm annoyed at the shutdown as I was only $250 away from having cleaned up my penny stash, so in the interim I'm continuing to filter through them and get the rejects ready to count when the machines come back up. My TD did offer to let me count at coinstar and reimburse me their fee, but I haven't taken them up on that yet.

[TheJonasCollegeFund]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[68Camaro]

Dumped about $120 at coinstar and got a gift card that I will use. Will probably do that with the last 100-150; then I'm finished with that project.

I have a couple years worth of accumulated Canadian from the TD magnet that we will take on our next Canadian vacation - we'll at least get a nice meal out of it. Saving the nickel nickels, everything else will go to that vacation. I've also got a few pounds of misc global coin that I'll probably ship to AG Metal some day for a few bucks.

Otherwise, this was the nail in the sorting coffin for me for the foreseeable future. I'll always look in change, but I don't see any more bank runs in my future.

[hobo finds]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=37802

[plus1hdcp]

Not to hijack the thread but I hate to hear the removal of counters anywhere. I only wish the magnet was accessible for me but I am glad my Credit Union has a counter at every branch. I hope you find another and can continue to project. I have enjoyed seeing the foreign coins you find. Every now and then a Canadian coin shows up here and anything else is about every other month or so.

[hammerrob]

From what TDBank is saying so far, they will continue with counting machines. It remains to be seen how long it will take to bring them back up, and whether they might change the sorting machines so that the magnet could no longer be accessed. They say they are testing ALL of their machines, so best case it might be quite a while before they bring the current machines back online. I agree with 68Camaro, I have found the machines to be pretty accurate, so hopefully the bank doesn't decide that major changes are needed.

[hammerrob]

Well, TD Bank is getting rid of the coin counters permanently - I kind of thought it might come to this. That pretty much knocks us out of the sorting game, we're not going to go out of our way to continue at some other bank. It was fun while it lasted!!

[68Camaro]

I'm not surprised either. Yeah - it was interesting while it lasted. I'm glad I finished my sort through my penny stash and off-loaded the dirty coins before this ended. That was about a $3000 face off-load, and that would have been a pain using coinstar, and would have missed most of the fun picking up the foreign coin. I actually wasn't quite done with the cent filtering when these went down - had a couple of hundred face left, but I put that on my starbucks card at coinstar, which was fine. My last visit to coinstar (at least for that purpose) today yielded a mini-haul in the reject tray - first of those I've seen of much significance. Got a number of US cents, a US dime, a Canadian dime, a Philippines 10 peso, and several tokens.

[Morsecode]

Interesting while it lasted...

Yes it was.

And now I've received inquiries from attorneys in two States, who somehow know that I visited 15 different Arcades 60-70 times per month between 2012 & 2014. One can only assume they have infiltrated TD's computer records via disgruntled employee or paid hacker. One even "projected" my possible losses by extrapolating the figure of $70,000 +/- in coin I may have run through the machines. A decent guess, maybe not a good thing. Not sure I want to get involved in the class action...lotta 'splainin to do.

A lawyer friend put me in touch with a colleague of his who handles civil class actions. I was curious about what they knew and how they potentially see the case proceeding. They don't.

Their opinion is that because TD allowed non-customers to use the machines there is no practical way to ascertain damages, since everyone in America (or at minimum the east coast) is a possible litigant. And this is from a law firm that recently successfully sued TD on an unrelated class action over the formula used to determine overdraft fees or some such. Obviously, the lawyers in Florida, New York, and New Jersey see it differently.

For me, the coin fires are all but flamed out. The kid I sold my route to did ok for six months, but he wasn't dedicated enough to make it pay. I used an Arcade maybe twice in the past 18 months.

In Feb, I walked into the branch nearest my house which ironically never had a machine...and lo & behold, there she was. I looked it over and said to the manager, "This is from the Allen Street branch, isn't it?"

She looked perplexed. "How did you know that branch is being closed? They haven't announced it."

"I didn't. Just recognize the machine." Priceless.

a last look at a sweet pull from back in the day...

[68Camaro]

What a haul that one! My best (I had a couple that were notable) paled by comparison. And I think I only got one silver coin ever. You were definitely the king of the arcade!