Good to hear from you Kantuck! Its hard to shake the mental image of someone at a sorting center opening a roll of solid silver and dumping it into the hopper...
Wish I could buy bags here. The head teller at one of my credit unions actually told me they were tripping over all the bags and I quickly offered to help her out by buying some. But they are afraid to run afoul of corporate policy prohibiting bag sales after some CRHers complained about being a few coins short.
You bring up a really good point and I suspect that you're right about CRHers complaints making the hobby more difficult. Around 10 years ago, I didn't have much difficulty getting tellers to empty machines, even when only partially full. If they wouldn't sell the partial, I would offer to fill it and then pay the difference and many were open to that. Lately I've found few banks that will even sell the full bags. They say that it's policy to "send them to the Fed." I always figured that the foreign stuff and being shorted by a coin or three was just a cost of the hobby and that hitting nice scores much more than offset any shortages, so why bother drawing any unwanted attention and making tellers' jobs more difficult by making any fuss. I took the advice of others on here and gave chocolates and such to particularly friendly banks.
If they're tripping over bags, you probably aren't missing much. I find it much more likely that there's a volume hunter dropping bags on them than some old lady hauling in bags of Barbers, WLs, and Franklins. I ran into that years ago. I stopped by a bank in western Indiana. I asked if they had any halves. After buying the loose ones, she said that they had $5,000 in bags in the vault, which I hadn't run into before. I bought one, just to give it a try. My wife searched it in the car, since we were on a road trip and she immediately knew that it had been searched because there was a purple mark on the rim of every coin. She did find one lonely 40% half with a purple mark on the rim... Take that purple marker guy!!
I'd say the complaints from CRHers, volume hunting, and just the general increase in hunters, and subsequently awareness by tellers are the primary reasons that the hobby became much more difficult.
I'd like to get back into buying boxes on a regular basis but the ROI wasn't worth it for me. I was averaging 1 40% per $1,000 searched so I gave up boxes. I still do an occasional nickel box or cent box, but mainly pop in random banks on work trips so that I can stretch my legs for a bit.
Kindest regards,
Kantuck
