I usually visit a couple of coins shops at least 3X a month to pick up some Morgans and / or Walking Lib halves. Both places have a couple of boxes of "junk" foreign coins and I always find some big copper / bronze pennies (English, Aussie, Irish, New Zealand) for dirt cheap, Mexican 20 Centavos also. Plus I can usually find some cool / strange stuff.

Lately I've been finding fewer and fewer of the pennies and my last visit yielded zero. I checked online and many internet magic stores that list them are out of stock.

I put bids on quite a few "lots" on Ebay and looks like I scored big so I'll have enough to last the rest of my life. Due to the size of the lots I paid about what I pay at the coin stores.....I won a sale of 116 English and Irish pennies, one of 94 of the same, and one of 57 Aussie / New Zealand....also a couple of lots of 8 to 12 coins......good stuff.

Have any of you noticed these coins getting harder to get? I really like the older ones which are made of bronze, not copper.

A couple of things I noticed during bidding:

1. The smaller lots seem to be bid on by collectors who are determined to buy THOSE coins, if you win the bid you'll pay "collectors prices"

2. The larger lots seem to be bid on by those who want to find coins to sell again in smaller lots. The higher the bid the less they'll make and the easier it is to buy if you have the money. The prices worked out to about .45 or .50 each for me, this includes shipping....

Take care all....