All you need to know about finding dropped coins in the street

23 April 2015

New York City resident Roger Pasquier has been keeping a record of the money he picks up along the footpaths he wanders each day, and for almost two decades collected about fifty-eight dollars a year. His… earnings however jumped to about ninety-five dollars annually from 2007 though.

This has been attributed to the arrival of the first of the smartphones. People are now so busy gazing at a screen, they miss any money that may have been dropped on the ground.

From 1987, when he began recording his findings, through 2014, he retrieved a thousand nine hundred and twenty dollars and eighty-seven cents. From 1987 to 2006, he averaged about fifty-eight dollars a year. Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and millions of potential competitors started to stare at their screens rather than at the sidewalks. Since 2007, Pasquier has averaged just over ninety-five dollars a year.

I tend to find coins on, or near footpaths, from time to time (hey, I’m a writer, I need all the help I can get). This usually over the summer months, and more often than not, two-dollar coins, rather than anything of lesser value.

I put this down to Australian two-dollar coins being, for whatever reason, the smallest coin, aside from the five-cent piece of course, and people thus not noticing when they fall from their pockets or wallet. Other coins are big enough to probably make some reasonable clink when they hit the ground, but not the two-dollar coin.

Pasquier meantime has all sorts of advice for those hoping to collect a dollar or two as they go about their affairs, worth a read really:

Good spirits, he said, are a liability. When you’re happy, you tend to look up, not down. “It takes a lot of will power to focus when you’re in a cheerful mood,” he said.

Originally published Thursday 23 April 2015.