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V11 2008 INDEX
E-SYLUM ARCHIVE
COLLECTOR CASHES COMPANY'S CANADIAN COIN CACHE
An E-Sylum reader writes:Here's a neat story of a guy from Texas buying bags of
Canadian coins at auction from Houston bus service and turning them into
paper money for a tidy profit during a visit up north. While visiting his
daughter at college up Northeast, he crossed the border and found a
Coinstar machine.
A Texas man's cross-border trek to cash in a
large number of Canadian coins acquired at auction has paid off with a
tidy sum just in time for the holidays. Michael Lay crossed the border with 42 bags of assorted Canadian coins worth $4,211 that he cashed in at a Coinstar Centre in a Hamilton supermarket Tuesday.
The machine accepts loose, unsorted change without having to be wrapped or rolled, and provides a voucher for value of the change which can be converted to cash or applied to in-store purchases, said Coinstar spokeswoman Marci Maule.
Maule said Lay had called the company's customer service department and mentioned he was going to Connecticut to visit his daughter, who attends Yale Law School, and was thinking of heading to Canada to cash in the coins.
As a collector, Lay said he is interested in foreign and collectible coins, but admits he took a chance buying the bags at a Houston auction not knowing exactly what the contents were.
The coins he purchased originally came from a Houston-area bus company, which over the years had collected them from passengers who had used them as bus fare. The problem was the coins were either no longer in circulation or weren't legal tender in the U.S.
Along with the large amount of Canadian coins, the collection included a rare two-cent coin from the U.S. Civil War era, several 1930s Canadian nickels, a liberty head half-dollar piece and several Chuck E. Cheese restaurant tokens.
"I did get a whole lot of junk pieces, tokens, some things I had never heard of ... but there were a lot of good things in there," Lay said in a phone interview Wednesday at a car dealership in New Haven, Conn., where his daughter's car was being repaired.
"I feel like I've at least doubled the money that we spent at the auction."
To read the complete article, see: Trek north to cash in Canadian coins pays off (http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2008/11/26/7546401-cp.html)
Wayne Homren, Editor
The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org.
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