Hi Ben,
I haven't asked for bags yet. I've been told by the branch managers that I'm the only one who dumps halves, so I don't want to get back more of my own dumps than I might already be getting. One branch had a bag of halves that had not been changed in the last 7 years. I dumped $930 on top of what was there. Of course, there might have been some silver in that old $70, but 93% of the bag was my own dump, so I didn't bother to ask.
I have seen that halves don't flow well into the bags. When the bag gets over 90% full, the halves don't slide toward the front of the bag. They stack up in the back, just under the chute. The tellers were initially simply replacing the bags at this point even though they were short (putting a machine generated count slip inside). But then we noticed the bags were not full and they experimented with pulling the coins forward to the front of the bag. That allows for more room. I believe the slots in which the bags are placed are very slightly too narrow for the halves to flow well. I asked about switching the half dollar bag to an end slot that is slightly wider, but the tellers can't make that change with the existing programming. They may discuss it with their repair tech the next time someone overloads the machine by dumping all their coins at once.
When i was a kid growing up near you (Taunton), I got rolls of pennies, nickels and dimes in the mid 1960's. More silver than clad in those days. The tellers were not nearly as friendly in MA back then as my tellers are in MD today. I culled the rare dates and errors from those rolls and then rode my bike at night to wholesale them to coin dealers from East Taunton to Attleboro. Pretty amazing what we did when we were 10-11 years old.
After your 5/5, I'm thinking about asking if my banks have any loose halves in their cash drawers when I pick up my boxes.
