Dime Sifting - Drought Gone

In a way, the result I got for the last box of dimes I ordered up shouldn't have been that much of a surprise. According to the label on the box, it came from the Toronto Transit Commission coffers; a Toronto city councillor is on record as a complainer about the number of American coins put in the TTC collection box. (The chair of the TTC, though, didn't see separating the two nationalities' coins as being cost-effective. Since the C$ is now back down to par with the US$, it was a good call on his part.)

To get back to the more immediate subject, I got 2,500 dimes from the same source that I got all the other coins I've sifted through: the Royal Bank of Canada, Yonge & Cranbrooke branch in Toronto. The last box I got, obtained when the C$ was slightly higher than it is as of the time of this post, contained no American dimes at all. This box, on the other hand, contained 64 American dimes, yielding a ratio of 2.56% Americans in the entire lot. Somewhat ironically, the number of American dimes was greater than the number of American nickels I had gotten last week, from a box of 2,000 of the latter. (The ratio of American nickels to all of them, though, was higher: 2.95%.)


Scarcities and oldies are much harder to find in the dime and quarter boxes than they are in the penny and nickel boxes. This disparity occurs because every dime and quarter minted before 1968 is composed of 92.5% and 80% silver (respectively): some of the 1968 issues contain 50% silver. At current silver exchange rates, this composition implies that a pre-'68 and post-1919 Canadian dime and quarter would be worth more than nine and eight times its face value (respectively), and a 1968 silver coin would be worth somewhere in the neighbourhood of five times its face value. The comparable dates for U.S. coins are pre-1965, when American dimes and quarter had 90% silver content. (If you want the specifics, click the links in this paragraph, as well as this one, which gives you the current silver spot price.)

In this box, I was lucky enough to find one: a 1963-date Canadian silver dime. It was heavily circulated with a common date, so its only value springs from the silver it contains. That value, on the other hand, is close to a dollar.

The other oddity I got was a dime-sized coin from the Cayman Islands, with face value of five cents and date of 2002. According to the same currency converter I used last week, that coin is (theoretically) worth about 6.1 Canadian cents.

You win some, you lose some. Merry Holidays/Happy Christmas to all.