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Cash exchanges don't want anything to do with coins.
Concur - the moneychangers don't handle foreign coins, even nominally "valuable" coins like 2 euro, 2 pound, or Canadian $2. I'm pretty sure they'd all flat out reject accepting them. If you bring home a bagful of coins with you from an overseas holiday and want to convert that back into local money, your only viable option was a coin dealer.
Most people travelling somewhere also wouldn't really be interested in acquiring coins beforehand, for the same reason that professional moneychanger don't do coins: they're just too heavy and bulky to repatriate. I know of one coin dealer here in Brisbane used to sell baggies of foreign coins, sorted by country, for face value equivalent, on the theory that people going overseas would want this service. But he rarely had any takers.
Years ago, I went to the Commonwealth Bank's foreign currency desk and bought AU$100 worth of banknotes from a couple of common-destination countries which I had zero current notes from at the time, just for the collection - France and Japan, I believe.
If you want a place where there's lots of variety in modern circulating coinage, I would recommend the coin dealers in Canberra. I went to Edlins many years ago and was surprised at the variety of different coinage available in their cheap foreign coins scratchtray. Why would Canberra be better than elsewhere in the country? I can only guess that perhaps a lot of foreign nationals try to visit their countries embassy to offload unwanted coinage, only to be knocked back from there as well and told to go to a coin dealer.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 10/20/2024 7:59 pm
