Busted into my most recent $1,000 box of half dollar rolls and found a silver coin in the first roll.
Then as tired as I am from the night watch patrols, I was determined to find the next one. An hour and many rolls supplied from a big Chicago bank (Big City banks are worthless and over gleaned at this point in time) later, four in one roll!
I always wanted to try that but never seem to get around to it. When I was a kid I did it with pennies looking for wheaties
I still look at pennies. Can't stop. I keep wheaties, any S (San Francisco) minted coins, and for a while I kept all that were 95% copper (pre 1981). Still common, now, but hardly the return of finding a silver coin.
For instance, with an investment of fifty cents, a 40% silver Kennedy is worth $6.45. A 95% copper cent is worth about $0.025 cents. Or aligning our decimal points better, a dollar in 40% silver is selling for around $12.90 at bullion dealers where a dollar in one cent coin is about $2.50 in copper melt down value. Still a decent return, but the bulk becomes a storage problem for long tern investment.
On a brighter note, your wheaties are selling for around ten bucks for a dollar's worth.
I have found that the "trick" to silver gleaning is to find a smallish local bank and "over order" a large quantity of coin rolls so that they have to clean out their own vaults of old stock and order more coin rolls from nearby banks to meet my order of fifty or one hundred rolls of half dollars.
No one uses half dollars much these days, so banks do not keep them on hand. I have to order them about a week in advance since bank branches usually only keep a few rolls of halves.
Then, disposing of the remaining non-silver clad coins is simply a matter of walking into a Walmart or Kroger store with a coin counting machine, dumping a box of loose coin and taking a voucher to a register or customer service for cash.
Banks usually charge a fee for taking loose coinage.
