As Lunar went quarter negative, Thorsen went to her bank to replenish her coin supply. But the bank was so short on change, she could only buy a few $10, 40-quarter rolls, and most often there were none at all. “Where the heck are they going?” says Thorsen, who now spends considerable time moving her shrinking supply of quarters from her washers and dryers back to her change machine. “It’s not like they disappeared.”

[...]

“They’re worth more than 25 cents right now, that’s for sure,” adds Alex Singleterry. He runs a network of 83 arcade games at his Ballard tavern, the Ice Box Arcade, and elsewhere in the Seattle area and loses so many quarters to noncustomers that he routinely has to send out an employee to search for more. “We had to go to three banks today to get stocked up on coins for the weekend,” he said Friday.

[...]

Technically, there is no quarter shortage, in Seattle or anywhere. The U.S. Mint produced nearly 24% more coins in 2020 than in 2019, despite a temporary pandemic slowdown, and continues to roll them out at “near record levels,” according to Mint officials.

The problem, federal officials say, is many of the roughly 55 billion quarters estimated to be in circulation have been stranded by the pandemic in places — under your couch cushions, say, or in your console coin holder — where the coin-operated economy can’t touch them. It’s a smaller, less visible version of the supply chain crisis, but with quarters instead of cargo containers.