Letter Re: Another Experience with Stockpiling Nickels

Dear Mr. Rawles,

I thought I would drop you a note on my experiences in attempting to collect a significant volume of nickels. After seeing the Coinflation.com site and some of your articles and hearing about the changes being made by the US government in what materials are allowed to be used to make nickels, I decided to take your advice and start collecting. I decided to obtain $1,000 worth to start with, so I went to my local credit union and walked up to the teller and asked what their policy was on obtaining large volumes of coins. She said that they have to pay for shipping of coins and that they order coins twice per week. They also ship their bulk coins that they collect in the coin counter they provide for their members to a company that counts and rolls and sells the coins back. She described the coin service they use. So I asked if they had any coins that they were going to have to pay to ship to the coin processing company that I could buy at face value so they could save money on the processing fee. She was happy to sell me a $200 bag of nickels, unrolled and only counted by their coin counting machine. I accepted that, bought the nickels and took them home. 4,000 nickels in one bag is not lite but it looked worse than it was for carrying.

I thought this solution seemed easy enough so I started dropping in at the credit union once or twice per week. At first they said they didn’t have any bags of nickels for me to buy and then after about two weeks they told me they weren’t allowed to sell me bulk nickels anymore and that their manager told them it was not allowed. I found this to be a little annoying, after all I was trying to help them to save processing fees by buying the nickels in a $200 bag so they didn’t have to pay the shipping for the nickels. I considered my options at this point. I wanted to find the least painful way to get this situation resolved so I thought I would call up the Vice President of the branches in the area and complain. I realized this was excessive and thought I would try calling up the manager of the branch first. Maybe he was a reasonable man. I was disappointed to hear him tell me they had recently had a meeting and established new rules for coin purchasing. The rules outlined that each non-commercial member was only allowed to purchase $20 to $30 worth at a time on a basis of once or twice per week. I explained that I only needed $800 worth and that if I buy $30 worth twice per week it would take me a little over one year to obtain my goal of $800 more worth of nickels. I then stated that this was really over burdensome. He countered that he anything more would cost them too much money. He asked when I would be bringing back the nickels and putting them through the counting machine in the lobby. Then he explained that they have been having problems with some of their members buying large volumes of nickels, sorting them and returning the bulk of all the low value coins while keeping all the coins that sell on eBay to collectors. I responded by promising not to bring back any nickels and that I simply wanted to store them. I would only bring them back if I became unemployed and foreclosed on my house and desperate to spend the money. He still resisted and told me that this was their policy and he had to follow the rules as they were given by the senior management of the Credit Union. I persisted and asked if he would please request an exception to the rules this one time so that I could obtain $800 worth of nickels and that I would be willing to pay a small fee to obtain them if needed. After waiting about a week he called me up and told me they were willing to grant my exception to the rules if I paid a one time $25 fee and promised not to bring them back and put them in his counting machine. I did some quick calculations and decided this was a reasonable solution and accepted. We setup a schedule and they have been calling me twice a week to pick either 1 $100 box or 2 $100 boxes for a total of $300 worth per week. I now have $600 worth of nickels in my safe and am on track to have my goal reached within a little over one week.

Thanks for all your help and advice and hard work on your blog. – Max