Depends what you have, what kind of dealers are near you and if you have enough to make it worthwhile to the big guys.
I have what I consider 3 kinds of coins.
1: Silver dollars like Morgans and Peace Dollars in good condition. I like them and they always will have scrap value.
2: Other silver like mercury, barber dimes, some older dimes (1800's...don't know what they're called), quarters and silver halfs. I have bags of them. If I wanted to sell, I'd look at Apmex for price and either send to them or go to a local wholesaler or maybe first try a local coin dealer. Know the spot price before going in. Apmex is a good place to find that as you can always add shipping and send to them. They require $1000 value minimum (so figure you need at least $100 face value).
3: Random other stuff like war nickles, wheat cents, older than wheat cents. These are the hard ones because dealers don't want your 15 wheat cents, 4 war nickles and other random stuff. They'd prefer a roll over steel pennies (have sold a few rolls of these) or $10 face of silver. My dealer will buy wheat cents (for like 1.5 cents each) if you have rolls. I had $20 face in rolls and it was easy to sell. International coins are worth nothing unless they are silver or gold. My local coin shop has a 1/2 55 gallon drum full of these for 1 cent each with a minimum of 100 bought.
If coin show dealers said to spend them, then I guess go ahead and spend them. I used to collect pre 1981 pennies because they're mostly copper and worth more in scrap value than 1 cent each. But how do you get any more than 1 cent each? I suppose you could hide them inside copper pipe that you bring to a scrap yard but boy....that's a lot of effort for the work involved and with scrap prices, you might barely get 1.1 cents each by the time you're done. I had $20 in these copper pennies and dumped them in my credit union coin machine along with the Canadian pennies (they're also copper). For reference, new pennies are mostly tin.
Most coin collections are worth far less than people think. Inherited collections sometimes have inventory with values but someone pulled the values from a book and mistakenly thought that uncirculated values were close to their circulated coins. If it's circulated, it's likely just scrap value.
