I was in my local Bank of America branch today where I know managers and tellers.
The manager said to me that while many BofAs had been requesting the coins, and many customers have too, she tried to ship $1,000 back to the reserve (the teller I go to had not know this til today) and they took them this time but said in the future, they will only accept batches of $2,000 at a time in shipments!
It turns out many banks would want to return many of these types of coins as they are not really fully circulated yet, and the reserve feels banks are not really the best place to do that after all. Oh well, my above argument was kinda ok but now has holes in it.
So while my bank had experienced some customer interest at its branch and via others, that manager had in fact taken $1,000 of my $4,500 worth of deposited coins in the past month and got spoken to about it from the feds.
She then told me that they would gladly take my coins in the future IF and ONLY IF I give them to the bank in batches of $2,000. not $500 or $1,500 or $2,500... batches of $2,000. And this was being instilled in all other BofAs soon too.
Hmmm...
Well, she was trying to be helpful by telling me this stuff but it was a bummer anyway. Seems the gig has its strains and in this case, it's going to happen at the banks -- at least BofA. She said that of course they'd accept the coins if it were say, a roll or a bunch of maybe $20-$30 worth or something, but otherwise they would not.
My bank only had about $100 worth of my coins left in stock today, they said. So $1,000 was sent back, at least $2,100 were sent to other BofAs and nearly $2,300 was given to customers according to her estimates.
They often take older paper money or excess cash and coins of any denomination and ship it back to the reserve. That's how many such banks handle their inventory weekly, it seems.