Americans apparently don’t much like change

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, February 23, 2002

By Nancy Benac

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — It’s lurking out there in sock drawers and coffee cans, ashtrays and cigar boxes, wicker baskets and coconut shells. And, yes, in piggy banks.

By design or neglect, Americans have tucked away loose change to the tune of an estimated $7.7 billion, enough to pay for the war in Afghanistan for nearly eight months.

Call them what you will — hoarders, accumulators or simply disorganized. An estimated 56 percent of Americans build up their change rather than spend it day to day. As many as 77 percent have a jug of coins around the house, worth an average of $30 to $50.

The figures are all courtesy of the folks at Coinstar, who have turned the coin-caching habit into a business by installing machines at supermarkets that count your coins and turn them into cash. For a cut of the take, of course.

The company cashed in $1.2 billion in loose change for Americans last year.

People seem to have their own systems for handling change.

Madeleine Albright, when she was secretary of state, was seen hauling a wicker basket into a Georgetown bank to redeem $38 in rolled coins.

Luis Medina of Washington, D.C., leaves his coins in the car to pay for the morning newspaper and coffee, and to bail him out in emergencies.

"Once I even used the change I collected there to fill up a tank of gas," he said.

Kathryn Kailian and her husband Aram, also Washingtonians, invited friends to bring their loose change to a post-Sept. 11 party to benefit a rescue fund. They wound up with a haul of more than $1,500 from boxes, cookie jars, plastic bags, an old sock and even a hollowed-out coconut head. Cashing it in was no small feat.

"I had to make eight trips to the bank with a dolly," Kailian recalled.

In building up their coins, Americans are fairly typical of people around the world who can afford to leave loose change lying around, says Steve Bobbitt, a spokesman for the American Numismatic Association, the largest association of coin collectors.

"Change becomes something that they like to have, but it also becomes a nuisance because of its weight," he said.

So much so that a fair amount of it winds up in the trash, says William Rathje, an archaeology professor at Stanford and author of the book "Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage." His study of a Massachusetts incinerator found that the million people it served were leaving about $8,000 worth of coins in their garbage every day.

"I think it tells us that we’re pretty well off," Rathje says. "Number two is that we’re often pretty careless about the way we handle money."

And so, the U.S. Mint keeps making more.

The Mint expects to produce about 15 billion pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. That’s down from 24 billion in the previous 12 months.

While the Mint supports coin-collecting as a hobby (139 million Americans are collecting the new quarters featuring different states), spokesman Mike White said that overall, "We prefer that people circulate coins" rather than toss them aside.

Although there is no research to support the theory, some observers think one reason for the reduced demand for coins is that more Americans are rounding up their loose change and cashing it in.

Beth Deisher, editor of the weekly newspaper Coin World, said that in the last half-year, there have been growing reports of unusual coins such as buffalo nickels and early quarters turning up back in circulation.

"People are going back into that stash or cache of coins," she said. "When they start the penny-pinching, if you will, they start looking at those coins they’ve discarded and realize 100 of them make a dollar."

Sometimes, the coin-stashing habit takes on a life of its own.

Sylvester Neal, a 58-year-old retiree in Auburn, Wash., started throwing coins in a coffee can when he was a teen-ager, and would fish out the silver ones when he ran short of money, leaving the pennies to accumulate. Did they ever.

His stash grew to more than a million pennies weighing more than 5 tons. When he moved from Alaska to Washington late last year, Neal cashed in most of that $10,000 bonanza to avoid the expense of moving it.

But he is back on the way to a million now. He held on to 300,000 of his older coins, and Coinstar paid him a promotional fee of $5,000, of which he claimed $3,000 in cents. That’s another 300,000 pennies right there.

"My immediate goal is to get back to the one-million-penny mark," Neal said. "My next goal is to have a dump truck full."

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