On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:58:08 -0700 (PDT), MIG
wrote:

On 18 Jun, 07:59, James Farrar wrote:
On Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:55:59 +0100, wrote:
"James Farrar" wrote in message
.. .

Todays 5p IMHO clashes with the lower threshold where coins are too
small to be convenient to handle.

They're almost impossible to pick up when dropped on a hard floor
without long fingernails. I've taken to hoarding them, along with
pennies and tuppences, and exchanging them at the bank when I have a
bagful.

Is there any estimate on how much in coins people are hoarding?

If you believe this American eco-nut, somewhere in the order of £400
million.

http://www.greenlivingtips.com/artic...ding-and-the-e...

"According to the research I was able to do, in Ireland, approximately
$60 million of coins are being hoarded. In the UK it's somewhere in
the region of three quarters of a billion dollars worth!"

Sounds reasonable. Right now I've got about £6 not counting the "in
use" ones.

A few years ago I had got into the habit of chucking all my brown
money into a box.

I didn't know what to do with it till Sainsburys provided a machine to
count it and give you a receipt that you could take to the till for
the equivalent in sensible denominations (minus an outrageous 7%).

The problem was that I could barely pick up the money and had to put
it in a large rucksack to get it there. I got over £80 even with the
ripoff.

But it would require about 9 million people to do something similar to
add up to the three quarters of a (presumably American) billion
suggested. I am not one of them any more.

£400 million, say 50 million people old enough to have coins (I have
no idea of the population age distribution but 40 million seems too
low and 60 million too high) makes for an average of £8 per person.

It could be a total figure for coins held by people (rather than
shops/banks) including "in use" coins, I suppose.