Dumb People Are Paying $1,000 or More for Bicentennial Quarters on eBay

By Charles Morgan for CoinWeek …..
 

Call me old fashioned, but I’m the kind of fella who believes in paying an honest price for an honest product. And I believe there’s an honest price for every kind of collectible and a justifiable reason for any collector to pursue any area of collecting if they so desire.

I say that because today, I think we need to talk about the 1776-1976 Bicentennial Quarter, a perennial favorite among collectors and an eternal chestnut for SEO companies looking to hoodwink Google. I’ve written about this before, but the TL:DR of it is that, thanks to flaws in Google’s algorithm, tens of thousands of articles have been written claiming this common coin still found in circulation is worth big bucks. Some of these spammers even claim the coin is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m not kidding. Let’s call it for what it is: a big lie. And this big lie is hurting people.

Now, before you say that I’m some blowhard who doesn’t appreciate the appeal of modern coins, know this. When I started my journey as a numismatic writer, I felt that the traditional rare coin market was missing the boat on modern coins. In modern coins, I saw an approachable area of the hobby that would resonate with coming generations of collectors who recalled spending Kennedy Half Dollars or seeing Wheat Pennies in change, or, yes, how cool it was when the Bicentennial coins were released as part of the nationwide observance of the 200th anniversary of the birth of American Independence.

Speaking for myself, I have no idea how many 1776-1976 quarters have been in my hands over the course of my lifetime. You certainly used to see them more frequently than you do now that the coin is approaching 50 years old.

Also, I don’t know if you know this, but the first article Hubert Walker and I wrote for CoinWeek when we were freelancers was about the risks and rewards of collecting the Bicentennial Quarter. Millions have read that article and watched the video version (see link) over the years, but it’s still not enough. If more people had read our level-headed analysis on the collectibility of the famous Drummer Boy quarter, then a beat-up circulated example would have never honestly sold on eBay for $1,799.

The seller of this worn Bicentennial Quarter makes a remarkable claim, saying it has a “rare filled mint mark.” On this coin, the mintmark is the small “D” located to the right of George Washington’s pigtail. This design element was struck onto dies by hand, usually by the United States Mint’s assistant engravers. Some accomplished this in one punch, while others had to tap the mintmark into the die multiple times. When the mintmark shows clear evidence of multiple punches due to the spread between impressions, we call this a Repunched Mintmark (acronym: RPM). If a mintmark variety existed for the 1976-D Washington Quarter, it would be an RPM. However, no RPMs for the 1976-D quarter are listed in the Cherrypicker’s Guide, and none are attributed by the industry’s leading third-party grading services.

The seller doesn’t call his rare variety an RPM; instead, he calls it a “filled mint mark.” A filled or clogged mintmark is a type of error where the mintmark is either bungled or clogged. Looking at the images provided by the seller, the “D” mintmark on this coin is neither filled nor clogged. Instead, what is plainly visible is wear. Over time and subsequent use, the finer details of a coin’s design will wear down. If a coin circulates for long enough, then the raised elements of a coin will wear completely flat until the coin is no longer identifiable. With clad coins, one will likely never encounter one that has had its design completely worn down, but those who collect America’s pre-1964 silver coins are well familiar with this phenomenon.

Now that we’ve cleared up the nonsense about the rare error, let me provide some incontrovertible evidence that the 1776-1976 Bicentennial Quarter is not worth the thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars these salacious internet posts claim. The above listing from the reputable Round Table Trading coin dealer tkeepercoins is for a complete 1976 U.S. Mint Set in Original Government Packaging. This set includes an uncirculated example of every business-strike coin issued by the United States Mint in 1976, including the 1976 Washington Quarter and the 1976-D. Why would a beat-up, circulated example be worth nearly 100x times more than a premium uncirculated one? The answer is obvious: it wouldn’t.

The offending listing, which reportedly sold for $1,799.95, isn’t the only recent sale reported by eBay of a Bicentennial Quarter going for exorbitant sums. The two listings imaged above were from sellers with zero feedback ratings. One hopes that these sales were never actually carried out.

Until humans take a bigger role in curating the type of content that Google and other social media companies disseminate, disinformation will continue to proliferate, and no amount of human expertise will be able to outshout a computer algorithm. I’ve done my part, but it remains to be seen if the refutation of a noted numismatic expert will be able to out-disseminate the 1976 quarter’s Big Lie.

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