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Stopped by a small local bank that I happened to be driving by tonight and picked up two $25 boxes. Sealed Brinks boxes with the plastic wraps. Teller was happy to give them to me and even offered more if I wanted them. Normally I would take all they would give me, but for some reason I said that just the 2 boxes were fine. Glad I did that! There was not 1 copper cent in either box unless you count the 1996 Canadian cent that I found. The consolation prize was one clad dime! Guess I won't be stopping in there for a while. When I asked for halves they said that they have a guy that comes in a few times a week and takes them all I'm gonna have to hit a couple credit unions tomorrow to make up for this skunkage.

It sounds like you're getting someone elses dumps. I agree that it is cause for suspicion when the teller is a little too eager to part with pennies. Lets hope its just a one time thing.

Sounds like the evil super sorter has come to your part of town.

Yeah - well NHsorter, if you see the larger thread on the Brinks/Coinstar sorting deal for $5M in cents, I posted yesterday my first skunk box of Brinks as well. So... it's happening all up and down the east coast, apparently.

I got $10 in plastic-wrapped Brinks pennies, and while the percentages were quite low, it wasn't a total skunk. I got 33 CU pennies (3.3%) out of the deal and a couple Canadian ones as well. I'm in the Northeast, and have been getting around 25% consistently from Brinks boxes prior to this. I guess avoiding Brinks is the way to go for now.

My normal sources are non-brinks users so I am lucky in that respect. Damn super sorter!

That super sorter will get ya. I am only ordering from Loomis now .

By far I sort more Brinks boxes than others and have not yet to get a skunk box. I was concerned about the huge copper cent order placed with Brinks. The order is reported to be from North Carolina and I'm in Virginia, so not far away but have not felt any impact yet. It could be that the big sorting machine is located in another region and that's where the sorting is going on. Bad news for those of you who live there.

Stopped by my credit union at lunch, which sometimes has CWR. This particular branch is captive and doesn't usually carry much change, so to my surprise they perked up and said they could give me $20 today. They brought it out and ... ugh - all Brinks plastic wrap. I feared the worst, but took it to check; all zincs. They only carry what change people bring in, so my conclusion is that there is another sorter in my CU who (as with the one who did the same thing with the Regions dump box I rec'd Friday), dumped his Brinks zinc. Worse, this one is a member of my CU!

Skunks when sorting for copper is terrible. Skunks during silver hunting is understandable, but not copper. The hobby is hard enough without skunks...

I'd try and avoid picking up from brinks supplied banks if you can...

~JobIII

Luckily I have only come across 2-3 banks that I typically drive by that have the Brinks plastic wrapped so it will be easy to avoid and it won't slow down the growth of the hoard.

Almost every place that I have stopped at randomly in the past week for some pennies has mentioned that they saw something on the news about people hoarding copper pennies and I just say "Yeah, I heard about that... crazy isn't it?" - Been getting turned down a lot more as well. But I still have my main source bank that is happy to supply me so I can't complain.

How far into NH are you located?

Common Cents wrote:I got $10 in plastic-wrapped Brinks pennies, and while the percentages were quite low, it wasn't a total skunk. I got 33 CU pennies (3.3%) out of the deal and a couple Canadian ones as well. I'm in the Northeast, and have been getting around 25% consistently from Brinks boxes prior to this. I guess avoiding Brinks is the way to go for now.

Ugh, that kind of percentage would drive me mad (I don't even want to think of how frustrating a full-on skunk would be). I hope you’re not hand-sorting.

JobIII wrote:How far into NH are you located?

My main source bank is in Mass, north of Boston, near where I work. It's a small regional bank so maybe I am using up their old stash and one of these days they will get a fresh shipment and then my glory days will end. Just guessing though, I don't know where any of it is coming from really.

Aside from this new issue with brinks, i've found that their boxes (at least in high volume) can tend to come with short rolls. This could be specific to me, but when i started ordering over 20 boxes i started noticing many boxes to have rolls that were clearly under. It sucked to open the box and a couple truncated rolls in the mix...

I would avoid the plastic wrapped rolls if you can. The ease of roll cracking does not beat having an accurate starting coin count, IMHO.

~JobIII