By Tim Binnall
A family cleaning out a home in California found a staggering one million pennies that had been stashed away by the previous owner, but the horde has wound up being more of a nuisance than a treasure as they cannot find anyone to take the sizeable pile of coins off of their hands. According to a local media report, the peculiar problem began when John Reyes set about clearing out his late father-in-law's residence in Los Angeles. While working on emptying the home's cramped crawlspace, he noticed some loose pennies littering the floorboards and, as he moved along, they formed a trail which led him to an enormous cache of coins that had been hidden away for years.
Reyes later determined that his father-in-law had collected the pennies after the United States stopped using copper for the coins as he suspected that they might be valuable someday in the future. As such, the man had amassed several dozens of bags containing the disused currency and, by way of some proverbial back-of-the-envelope math, the family concluded that there were approximately one million pennies in total. While they were initially delighted by the discovery, the family soon realized that they had something of a challenge on their hands as cashing in all the coins has proven to be a rather difficult task.
To that end, they were initially going to simply deposit them into a Coinstar vending machine, but they did not want to pay the required 8% fee for such a sizeable sum. A trip to a local bank saw the family rebuffed as the manager indicated that "I don't even have the room in my vault" for all of the loose change. A second financial institution in their hometown of Ontario also had no interest, but did suggest that they search through the horde since there could be pieces of significant value waiting to be found. Although the idea did intrigue them, the family say that they simply do not have the time nor the energy to invest in sifting through a million pennies in the hopes of finding one possible life-changing coin.
With that in mind, they has now listed the entire cache for sale online for a whopping $25,000. While that is significantly more than the $10,000 the coins would yield as contemporary currency, their reasoning is that there are likely some pennies that are more valuable than simply one cent. For now, they have yet to receive a reasonable offer which would rid them of the huge horde, though they are hopeful that the publicity surrounding the discovery might inspire some enterprising individual to take a chance and buy the entire collection from them. "The value is in the uniqueness," Reyes declared, indicating that the family will take no less than the cache's market value out of respect to his late father-in-law, who squirreled them away for so many years.