In 1982, the U.S. mint switched the composition of pennies from copper to copper-plated zinc to cut down on costs. The cost of the copper needed to make a penny was higher than the coin’s face value. It is common for people to buy huge boxes of pennies from banks to search for copper pennies.
Now, the collectors will go through these boxes with machines that can detect whether a penny is copper or not. Some of these machines are very sophisticated and others are not. The ones that are not are these basic, hand-fed machines which are very labor intensive.
They look like this.
People will collect copper pennies because their melt value is more than their face value—the last conversion I remember was that a copper penny was equal to 2.5 cents or a little more than double face value. This conversion is based on the price of copper but the copper value is always greater than the face value.
The catch is that it is illegal to melt coins for their metals, because the mint knows that the metal in the coin is worth more than face value.
However, many people are convinced that we are on the brink of this law changing—I’ve been told this since 2009.
The father of my best friend is one of the people who believed the law was going to change so he started sorting pennies in 2010. It became his go-to hobby and he fills his free time with sorting through thousands of pennies. The last count I received from him was that he had sorted through over 425,000 pennies looking for copper ones.
My best friend and I used to help him feed pennies one by one into his little machine and then would box up the zinc pennies to be sold back to the bank.
This would be a fairly profitable investment—he is buying a currency for 1 cent and is then able to “sell it” for 2.5 cents. That is a crazy ROI.
He has spent weeks of his time doing this—this is what he does when he gets off work or wants to relax.
It doesn't seem like they are ever going to change the rule to allow him to melt the pennies which means that he has spent weeks hand sorting pennies for no reason.
That has to set a record for the most time consuming thing that turned out to be useless.
Read other related questions on Quora:
- What is the most useless thing you ever bought?
- What is the most useless thing that you ever did and that wasted both your money and time?
- What is the most "illegal" thing you've done and gotten away with?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2jNcU5B
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