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My son and I were at one of our normal pick up banks for halves and there were 3 ladies with ammo boxes of coins taking a major dump. Cameron ( my 15 yr son ) looked over and seen a huge pile of copper cents on the top of the hopper. He said "Dad, see if we can buy 'em!" I went to speak with the vault teller while he waited in line for our 3 boxes of halves. Annita, the vault teller, said the ladies had been there for 2 hours dumping and were about finished. She asked what I wanted and to come back in a half hour. I go back to the line and now the front door of the machine is open. I see these black metal cases that look a lot like a small brief cases lined up in the bottom of the machine. There must have been 8 - 10 of these cases. Another teller is filling out one of the clear plastic Fed bags preparing to empty one of the metal "brief cases". We get our halves and go visit Grandma to kill a little time. Grandma moves her shotgun and ammo boxes off of the snack bar and gets us some orange juice (man, I wish her daughter was more like her, we really like orange juice). She asks us why the suprise visit and gets this twinkle in her eye as we tell her what we were doing. Its the first we ever talked to her about our "bank mining". She puts her hand over on the shotgun and asks if we want her to ride along. Not wanting an FBI investigation, I assure her that we'll be OK. "And besides, if Grandpa comes home and your not here and your shotgun is missing, he might get scared". She says, " Oh no! Theres plenty of long rifles and side-arms here. He won't be scared". On the way back Cameron says " I really like Grandma" We get back to the bank and take all the pennies (4 bags)and nickels (1 bag) and 1 bag of dimes. After paying for our halves, I only had a couple grand left at that bank. I would have taken more dimes if I had the funds there. We get the pay dirt home and begin processing. The boxes of halves are skunks. The dime bag produces 9 silvers. The nickel bag produces a lonely Buffalo ( Ray, if you're reading this, not that kind of nickel bag and dime bag!) OK not bad production. But, the penny bags net 1 - 1974 copper cent. We are like, What? We know we saw a pile of coppers in that hopper. 20,000 pennies and only 1 copper. We generally get 25% +/- around here. Were these pre-sorted by someone and the last thing these ladies put into the counter was the coppers and they were still in the counter as the case(s) were not quite full yet? That doen't seem likely. Does that machine sort copper and someone at the bank takes the coppers for themselves to get the wheats? I've never heard of a commercial counter that sorts. Have any of you? Did my son and I see that pile wrong? Gosh, I can't believe we both read that wrong. When we picked up the bags they didn't look good. My eye caught that. Were the bags from someone else's prior dump? Not likely, a teller said they dumped over $5000 worth of change. $200 in pennies sounds like a reasonable percentage as I do know they dumped pennies. Strange very strange. Any thoughts?

That story could have used a few paragraph breaks and maybe an indent or two.

And maybe a different title.

tedandcam wrote:...and 1 bag of dimes... I only had a couple grand left at that bank. I would have taken more dimes if I had the funds there... The dime bag produces 9 silvers...

My first suggestion is you go back and get the rest of the dimes.

...We know we saw a pile of coppers in that hopper.

My second suggestion is you go back and get the next bag of pennies. Worst you can do is strike out again. Best you can do is finally get the coins you were looking at, and actually score the copper.

Does that machine sort copper and someone at the bank takes the coppers for themselves to get the wheats?

Doubt it.