THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

So it’s been awhile of change finding for me and I thought I would give some reports. My Internet friend Carey has been tasked with creating a website to track change finding and I am pleased to report that this morning he made some good progress on it.

In the meantime, I am just using a spreadsheet. So, in 54 separate occurrences (on 29 distinct days) I have found $4.29. That’s 67 days since I started on June 28th, meaning there have been more zero days than coin finding days.

Breaking it down, I have found coins in 15 different municipalities in 5 states. 3 different people have found coins for me (I count coins found by me ever-growing army of minions) and an additional 4 people have tipped me off to coins.

Breaking it down another way, that’s 7 quarters, 16 dimes, 6 nickels and 64 pennies (12 of them being pre-1982 copper pennies.

So it got me to wondering, why have I found so few nickels? I had an interesting conversation yesterday with my friend Jeff who writes an incredibly boring blog about Microsoft stuff (). Since he lives in (near) Columbus, I was IMing him to ask what city / township / municipality the rest stop on I-71 just north of Columbus was. See on the way back from Cleve-o Sunday night I found a dime there and so I needed to ensure accurate reporting for my log.

In the end, we decided on “Sunbury” but that is neither here nor there. After we decided on that, the conversation went towards my dearth of nickels. He said that he also gets fewer nickels back in change. We started talking about the various price endings (00, 01 … 99) and how you only get nickels if it ends in 5-9. So I started writing up a spreadsheet with the different values and what coins you might get. Then I slapped myself and remembered Dan’s first law of the Internet. Naturally that was already done.

So what about you, dear readers? Do you also find that nickels are the least-used coin?