I placed an ad, stating I was looking to buy coins. I received a call, spoke with him a bit, and drove out to see the guy at his house. He had a rather large assortment of us and foreign coins in which he had zero clue of what he had. They were passed down to him, and the previous collector did him no favors in storing them(random coins stored in old yogurt cups). LOL. It was a blast for me opening and searching these cups, for one cup would have old foreign coins, peace dollars, wheat cents, v nickels, etc. I started going through his coins and telling him, what I would be interested in buying. He then started to become stand offish, telling he would not sell to me today, he would think about it. I was a little peaved, as I drove a bit to get to him. So I decided to just teach him about what he had. I explained which coins had silver in them, which coins were key dates, and the basics of grading.(trying to explain a very good grade coin is not very good, was challenging. I think I helped him out greatly. After about an hour with him, he said, that he would sell the coins to me that I wanted. I offered him very fair prices, and he was happy. Question. 1. How do dealers handle someone who has about 500 old foreign coins? do dealers look up each coin, or just stay away?
I'm not a dealer but I do buy World coins just to do the research. A little knowledge never goes wasted and sometimes you find something rare. A dealer near me used to sell them by the pound for $12.00.
First you have to define old. As with most things knowledge is the key, and provides the answer. The majority will just stay away because they don't know anything about them. Others have a little basic knowledge and know the rough cutoff dates for when silver stopped being used in most countries and so will buy silver coins based on some percentage of melt. And some will just offer a rough number for the lot planning to throw them in their junk bins - if they need replenishing. But the simple fact of the matter is that foreign coins are a lot like US coins, only worse - the vast majority are as common as dirt and have little to no value. And the pool of potential buyers for them is a lot smaller than it is for US coins. Dealers know this so they know the risk they face if they buy them - at any price. Think for a minute, if a collector walks into a shop looking to sell with bags, jars, boxes, whatever, of mixed US coins, hundreds of them - how many dealers are going to take the time to go through all those coins ? How long would it take you to look at 500 coins ? And that's with coins that you know about. The answer is most would not take the time at all because it isn't worth it, their time would be wasted. So they pick out silver & count quickly, offer a % of melt for those, and offer face, or twice face for the copper - take it or leave it. Doing anything else is not worth their time. Now do the same thing with foreign coins, everything just got worse - from a seller's perspective.
I think you did the right thing trying to give him a "quick" education on the coins he had. I doubt that others would do the same, and that is probably why he did an "about-face" and accepted your offer. Chris
Stupid question Doug, why did the hobby end up with US and foreign coin as distinct groups and not just coins by country for example?
Simply put, natural way of things more than anything else. Coin collecting in the US has undergone many periods where its popularity increased, even back in the 1800's. But back then and even still today that popularity is relative to the extreme degree. What I mean by that is this, even if the number of collectors increased 10 fold over a short period of time, say a decade, after the increase the total number of collectors would still be but a tiny, tiny, fraction of the general population. That is still true even today. But imagine if you will what the world was like even as recently as say the 1970's, let alone before that. Even in the 1970's travel outside of the country was something that only the rich or the reasonably well off did. And travel outside of the country was the only way there was really for people to be exposed to foreign coins because the US is bordered by oceans. Sure some would see some Mexican or Canadian coins in border towns but that was about it even for those. And most of them soon made their way back across the border because they could not be spent or easily cashed in in the US. And that problem still exists today. Now imagine even in today's world how few foreign coin dealers there are compared to the number of dealers in US coins. Then imagine how very few there were in the 1970's and before. You could probably divide today's number by a 100 and still not get close to what there was then. So people simply didn't collect foreign coins because they couldn't, it was too difficult. Let me give you an example. My grandfather is the one who got me started collecting coins in 1960. He himself collected foreign coins. The town we lived in was fairly small, about 16,000, and of all the coin collectors in our town, and collecting was really taking off in the '60s, (Coin World started in 1960) he was the one and only person who collected foreign coins. Back then you could walk into Woolworth's, Sears & Roebuck, Montgomery Wards, JC Penny's - any department store - and buy coins. They all had them. But none of them had any foreign coins for sale. Back then I could save my money, walk into any bank, and buy a roll of Morgans - for face. I used to do it all the time. Most other coins that we collect today were still in circulation. That's how easy it was to get US coins. The reason my grandfather collected them was because they were the only ones he could afford, and that was because he got them for free. Mainly from his friends who had come back from overseas during WW II and had a few of them laying around. My grandfather worked at the State Liquor Store and when his friends came in, they'd give him a few. Over the years word spread and others he didn't even know would give him coins, simply to get rid of them. They didn't want them, couldn't spend them, so they gave them away to him. So, the natural way of things, if you wanted to collect coins you collected US coins or you didn't collect at all, because they were all you could get. And it had been that way for a hundred years. Also you need to remember how resistant people are to change. If something has been 1 way for a hundred years, it's not likely to change, and certainly not very quickly. So most new collectors that came along after the 1970's collected US coins because that what everybody else did. But with increased travel & trade things did start changing, the world got smaller, slowly. And it has taken 50 years just to get to the point we are at today, where we have a few collectors of foreign coins. But compared to the total number of collectors, still a small fraction. Now imagine trying to break that small fraction into even smaller groups, by country for example. It's a lot easier now because there are more - but 50 years ago ...................... The natural way of things.
hahahahha after all these years you still get yourself set up like this hahahaha I am not even going to say anything
I'm going to be a bum and not read everyone's responses they are just to long. For the most part foreign coins are not worth much. It takes a lot of time to look them up. So if they don't look silver and they are from the 1940's or newer most dealers pay $2-$5 a pound.
A couple other things to add to Doug's comment. Another problem for the foreign collector back then was references. US collectors have had the Redbook since 1946 (1947 coverdate) and before that Wayte Raymonds Standard Catalog of United States Coins, and even before that Max Mehl's Rare Coin Encyclopedia and Augustus Heatons pamphlet on mintmarks. But before 1972 there was no Standard Catalog of World Coins. The only commonly available books were R S Yeoman's Coins of the World 1860 - 1960, and Craig's Coins of the World 1750 to 1860. Both of those were published in the 1960's and only listed the coins by type in a single grade and with just a type coin price. Occasionally they might list the key date for a given type. If you collected the older world crowns (and who did?) there were the Davenport books. But those coins were seldom encountered and at the time the books were expensive. If you wanted anything more comprehensive you had to collect auction catalogs as well. Then like Doug said US coins were readily available. Coins back to the start of the 20th century could be found with some roll searching, and older coins could often be had from older relatives. But where did you get foreign coins? About the best you could do were world minors from the 30's and 40's brought back soldiers from WWII and if you were lucky maybe some from the WWI era, also coins brought back by soldiers. Todays casual foreign collector still has the same problem. Almost all the business strike US coins made in the last half century can still be obtained by roll searching, but where does the foreign collector get coins? The WWI and WWII soldiers are pretty much gone and in the later conflicts the soldiers mainly used US coins/currency/MPC's/or scrip. They didn't bring back that much in local/world coinage. A little comes back from travelers but not that much. And if it is that hard to collect the world coins in general, the idea of collecting a specific country is even more remote. So a new collector faces plenty of US coins available, few foreign coins, and the vast majority of the other collectors he meets collect US. the odds are heavily weighted in favor of that new collector collecting US coins. Having sounded so negatively against foreign coins, lets now say a few words in their favor. In general they are CHEAP, even for older coins. There is an incredible variety of coins available. You can collect hundreds if not thousands of coins and have no two alike. You can learn a lot of world history, politics, geography, languages etc. And for those just starting out poundage and junk boxes go a long way to overcoming the availability problem. Then on the coin forum there is even the possibility of making friends around the world as trading partners
