COIN DISTRIBUTION IN THE UNITED STATES
I have a coin sorter on my dresser. Whenever I come home with coins in my pocket, I put them into the sorter. When I get enough of a given type of coin, I put them into a paper wrapper and, every few months, I take a bunch of rolls to the bank and get what seems to be like free money.
It seemed to me that I was cashing in a lot of penny and quarter rolls, significantly less dime rolls and hardly any nickel rolls. This was happening so consistently over a long period of time that I was sure that the scarcity of nickels couldn't be just by chance. Thinking about the situation, the purpose of coins in modern times is just to make change for a purchase. When I was a boy, in the 1950's, coins had enough value to actually buy something of value with one of them. Back then, a candy bar cost a nickel and a comic book cost a dime; for two small coins, you could rot both your teeth and your mind.
The table below first shows the number of coins required to make change for a dollar bill in most efficient way, i.e., the smallest number of coins, for all possible purchase totals from 1 cent to 99 cents. In other words, to make change for 99 purchases with each possible total, you'd need the 470 coins as shown. The same coins would be needed to make change for purchases of $0.79, $1.79, $12.79 and so on as the coins are only used for the cents part while the dollar part is dealt with by bills. And there are those people who dig in their pocket or purse to make exact change or toss a few quarters on the counter, but they seem to be the exception from my observation. People generally pay with bills and get a few coins in change. Note that only 9% of the required coins are nickels, which matches my observations.
| Coin: | 1 ва | 5 ва | 10 ва | 25 ва | Total |
| For $1.00 | 200 | 40 | 80 | 150 | 470 |
| Percent | 43% | 9% | 17% | 32% | |
| | | | | |
| Production | 5.42 | .64 | 1.05 | 2.54 | 9.65 |
| Percent | 56% | 7% | 11% | 26% | |
The bottom two rows show the production of coins in 2008, the last completed year when this item was written. Production is given in billions of coins. The production percentages follow the theoretical distribution for the change making above in a general sort of way. Production data was obtained from this website:
http://www.usmint.gov/about_the_mint/coin_production/index.cfm?action=production_figures&allCoinsYear=2008#starthere
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