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Oct. 1st, 2004 02:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vyvyanxWell, this poll produced some interesting results, I thought. I'd half expected people to be divided into simply "those who pick up everything" and "those who ignore coppers", but it turns out that there are people who distinguish between every adjacent-value pair of UK coins with the exception of 20p and 50p! (I.e. nobody who answered the poll would pick up 50p but not 20p.) I also hadn't expected that anyone would not bother to pick up any coin in the street (perhaps I should have given further options involving £5 and £10 notes, but that might be getting into the territory where people would consider handing it in to a police station).
I suppose this fairly smooth curve ties in with my experience of finding coins in the street anyway - I find pennies frequently (perhaps once or twice a week), 2p pieces much less often, 5p pieces maybe a couple of times a year, and almost never anything larger, suggesting that other people have already found them and picked them up. I guess there will also be issues of how many of each type of coin are typically to be found in people's possession (probably more 1p than 2p pieces, due to shops selling things for £2.99 and similar); people perhaps keeping different types of change in different places (e.g. higher value coins in a purse or wallet, coppers in a more insecure trouser pocket); people bothering to pick up their own 5p or 10p pieces if they drop them, but not picking up other people's...
I suppose this fairly smooth curve ties in with my experience of finding coins in the street anyway - I find pennies frequently (perhaps once or twice a week), 2p pieces much less often, 5p pieces maybe a couple of times a year, and almost never anything larger, suggesting that other people have already found them and picked them up. I guess there will also be issues of how many of each type of coin are typically to be found in people's possession (probably more 1p than 2p pieces, due to shops selling things for £2.99 and similar); people perhaps keeping different types of change in different places (e.g. higher value coins in a purse or wallet, coppers in a more insecure trouser pocket); people bothering to pick up their own 5p or 10p pieces if they drop them, but not picking up other people's...
