Do the major online retailers go through mint rolls to cherry pick the coins they feel are the best to later have them submitted to a TPG and slabbed? And the "lesser" quality coins are sold individualy online to the public?
well most dealers look through collections and sort through "unsearched rollS" at some poing my dealer has a draw with envelopes of clear films he slide coins onto to check them later so he knows everything in that draw are either oddities or cherries .. everytime i go there he pull out something from that draw... and I giggle.. cause I know its going to be cool
I certainly agree with you when it comes to a collection or "unsearched rolls". But let's apply this scenario to modern freshly minted coins. This trend of modern semi-numis being slabbed by the boatload. I'll use a 2013 Panda as an example. Single coin in OMP retail is $30... MS-69 it's $40 and an MS-70 is $55. I know the TPG have introduced reduced price grading services for modern coins but even at the reduced rate, a volume discount, shipping and handling, and then the marketing and overhead a dealer must pay how do they make any real profit? I know they get the coins at wholesale but even then 7 out of 10 coins they submit would have to come back MS-70 and the other three as MS-69s. Do they cherry pick mint rolls? Have a crew go through each mint roll and examine each coin to only select the "best" for grading? And the others go up on eBay or are sold on there websites to retail customers? A modern minted coin in a mint roll fresh from the mint should automatically already be an MS-69 or MS-70. For goodness sake it's brand new and has never been handled.
When I read your first post you had me thinking about something entirely different than what you explained in your next post. But to answer your question about whether or not dealers search new rolls, some do and some don't. But before I explain that I think I need to mention a few other things so as not to give some folks the wrong idea. Most dealers don't even sell modern coins struck for circulation. Bullion coins are a bit different, a lot of dealers sell them but they sell them only as bullion and would not even dream of sending them in for grading. But since there is a small niche of collectors out there who like to collect modern bullion coins that have been graded there are some dealers, just not a whole lot of them, who will send them in for grading. The same is true with moderns struck for circulation and modern Mint & Proof sets. There are two ways they go about doing this. 1 - some of them will search through rolls and/or bags, pick out the best examples and send them in for grading. 2 - they will just buy a bunch of the coins, send them all in but specify a minimum grade. When they do this only those coins that meet that minimum grade requirement are graded and slabbed and the others are returned to the submitter ungraded and not slabbed. As to how they can afford to do this, it's like any other business decision. With bullion coins yes they lose money on the coins that do not grade 70. But by sending in huge numbers of the coins they get a discount on grading fees. And they know that there are enough people out there who will overpay for the 70's to cover their expenses and provide a profit. And it's much easier to do that today than it was even a few years ago because today and much larger percentage of the coins are graded as 70's. In many cases the majority of them and sometimes a large majority are graded as 70's. A quick look at the pop reports will show you this. With coins struck for circulation and Mint/Proof sets things are a bit different but the principles are the same. In some cases a 67 is about the best you can hope for, in others it will be a 68 or 69. And there are some 70's given. But things work out the same, they make enough on the higher graded coins to pay for all the rest.
Thank you very much for that clear, concise, logical and well explained answer to my question. The big retailers that do this must keep overhead to an absolute minimum I would imagine. Those who cherry pick before a bulk submission to a TPG I wonder how much they pay the people who look through all those coins. It must be a poorly payed mind numbing job.
Most of the dealers I know, do not have the time to search rolls. They are doing good just checking collections and the junk silver coming in the door.
As with many when I seen this question I to was curious. Thank you for that explanation! Really answered the question well and makes a ton of sense from a business point of view.
Thanks for this information. So THAT's how my LCD makes a buck. I knew it sure wasn't from selling fitty-cent-a-pop clinkers to me out of his world-coin tupperware tub! Why are more coins grading as 70s compared to earlier? Is it perhaps because the mint(s) have been getting better at manufacturing flawless coins? I sometimes buy silver commemoratives made by the Japan Mint or KOMSCO, and boy, they really do a good job of creating nearly-perfect strikes. Is this the case with the US Mint, too?
