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I am curious about something, and, please don't go to any great lengths to answer this question. I am wondering what percent of late date wheaties have been taken out of circulation vs. early date Lincoln Memorials.

So, let's just focus on two years if we can- 1958 (wheat cents) and 1959 (Lincoln Memorials). Let's ignore mintmarks to make things easier.

Does anyone sort their Lincolns by date so they can tell the RC community how many 1958's they have and how many 1959's they have? This would help to determine how many people are taking wheaties out of circulation vs. plain old coppers. Don't do this if you have been buying coins- this should only be done for coins found in change and bank/customer wrapped rolls. Also, if you have been selling some/all of your holdings, that will likely skew the results to make them illegitimate.

Note that to be statistically significant, it is important that you started sorting the 1958's and 1959's at the same time. In other words, if you started sorting 1958's by date ten years ago and only started sorting 1959's in the last year, it will be hard to ascertain legitimate survival rates of the two vs. each other.

If, for instance, there are half as many 1958's found as there are 1959's, that would mean that there are roughly twice as many people who will pull a wheatie out of change vs. just a regular copper cent. Of course the numbers would have to be adjusted for the original mintages of each date.

Again, please don't go to any great lengths on this.

P.S. It would also be interesting to do this with 1964 & 1965 dimes and quarters, but almost nobody saves average circulated 1965's by date. Therefore, it would be much more difficult to come up with a reliable survey for those coins. Perhaps it might be possible to do this with 1959 and 1960 nickels. I'm going to look into doing this for Kennedy halves, comparing 1964's found (90%ers) with all the 40%ers (1965-1969). When I get that info, I will post it as a separate message.

I've been going through $25 bank boxes for years, I documented many aspects, but not the 1958 wheaties. I find a pretty solid average is 10-12 wheat pennies per $25 dollar box. I do count the 59's and 60's though so I can contribute to your question. A pretty solid average for 1959 per $25 box here in the midwest where my box copper averages are between 27-30% average is 7-10 per box.

I find wheat pennies moreso based on mintage numbers, if they made a billion of them, more are floating around. 1944, 1945, 56d, 57d, 58D very common, then like the 40, 41, 42, again pretty common as are a few of the 1930's that have 200-300 million mintages.

Wheat penny piles and hoards are everywhere, they have little value as they are cherry picked a hundred times over. I've had LCS sell them for between 2 cents and 4 cents. I also track the 2009 penny, generally I see 9-14 of those in a $25 dollar box.

Recently I went over my 1960 cents that I had been saving for the last 7 years, and found one really nice RPM.

I keep count of 59's and recently broke down a bunch of my 50's wheats by year/mm. I currently have 188 of the 1959's pulled via roll searching, and 71 of the 1958's. In 2010-2012 I did 2-3 boxes a month. Took about a 4 yr hiatus and am back to about that level of searching. I'm about $4 into a box today and just pulled a VG10 or F12 1909 no VDB.....I'll update our stats when done. No 58's so far and 1 1959.

cwgii does viewtopic.php?f=10&t=40453&p=315323#p315323

I have found 151 wheaties from 1958 and over 1,000 1959 memorials. I can produce an exact count of the 1959s later on if you'd like.

PennyPincher wrote:I have found 151 wheaties from 1958 and over 1,000 1959 memorials. I can produce an exact count of the 1959s later on if you'd like.

I don't want you to waste a lot of time on it, but I appreciate that it is over 1,000.

Thanks for all the responses thus far. I've already sent a PM to someone who likely will have additional info to share.

I'll check on the 58s. Don't separate the 59s.

John, don't worry about the 58's. That data won't mean anything without data on the 59's. But thanks anyway!

That last box had 3 - 1959's and no 58's. Which changes my total to 191 and 71. I suppose 59's survive because a lot of people pull wheats and drop them in a drawer or jar thinking they may be worth more than they are. Mintage wise - there is a decent disparity, with just over a million of the 1958s and just under 1.9m of the 1959's. But I pull the 59's at nearly a 3-1 ratio in Florida, and PennyPincher is nearly 10-1!