How do TPGs find graders?

And INSIDER here works at ICG, another TPG.

 

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I wonder what the turnover rate is at the TPGs? It would seem to me that the burn-out rate might be high. While I love looking at coins as a hobby, doing it for a living at the rate of hundreds per day would get to be a beast after a while. Particularly if I was assigned hundreds of ASEs and the like. How interesting would that be?

Is the work at the TPGs a sweatshop environment with production quotas and the same mind-numbing rotework all day every day? Or is it interesting enough to keep people at it for years on end?

I don't know the answers to these questions but they certainly bear on the original question of getting and keeping what is no doubt a highly skilled and unique workforce.

 

Thank you. I always enjoy reading your explanations. Feels like I'm having coffee with you and listening. For some reason, I was under the impression that it's getting tougher and tougher for the TPGs to find graders (because we're becoming more and more a cashless society?). When I look at the membership numbers in their magazine, the February issue shows only about 29,783. Wow... that's less than 1/100th of 1 percent! So I thought that as the older graders retire, there'll be fewer and fewer replacement candidates. Hopefully, I'm mistaken - which is great news for the hobby. Thank you again.

 

Poor ICG... I was reading an article in the APMEX Learning Center, which graded the TPGs as follows: PCGS, NGC, ANACS, ICG. Then that made me wonder "who grades the graders" and what KPIs do they use? And if ICG is the fourth, what do they have to do to make it to No. 3, No. 2, or even No. 1? But that's a thread for another day I guess.

 

The only real issue for them is that people with that type of skill can make more money on their own than they would being a grader.

The market sets the hierarchy and it's pretty set in stone at this point.

 

Where's SEGS?

 

1/100th of 1 percent of what ?

 

PCGS really needs help mostly in quality and customer service.

 

Oh - sorry... of the U.S. population.

 

The thing that was missed though is that it is actually very significant that PCGS has over 20k unique collector members paying to be able to submit to them. That's actually a huge number of people with an interest actively submitting and learning from it

 

Yeah, that's pretty high. Good point.

I'm what I would say is a semi-serious collector...I'm active in the online forums and I bid seriously at HA and GC every few months at worst, every few weeks when working FT.

I don't submit and never have, just because I have never bought raw coins.

 

Nothing wrong with that. I just think people often overlook the significance of such a large number of paying collector submitters when the overwhelming majority of collectors never submit a single coin in their life

 

I will be looking at coin show attendance once everything re-opens. Hopefully, others here will, too.

Wonder if baseball card shows will experience a rebirth....

 

Why? Do you mean as you want to go or a measure of interest? They’re a horrendous measure of interest and demographics

 

I am thinking that between (1) pent-up demand from previous attendees (like me) and (2) all the new online bidders since Covid-19 hit......there could be a big surge in attendance.

Even if it doesn't last, I would think that newcomers who got into online bidding might have interest in seeing stuff in person.

 

Shows are really just a measure of their own show which was really the only point. None of them are indications of anything other than what happens there.

 

You might be right.

At least now I've been to FUN so I can compare next January.....and I've been to some local shows quite a bit the last few years and can compare there, too.

I'll report back in a few weeks/months once everyone has had a chance to get vaccinated and see if it's pretty much the same or if I see a big increase.

 

I wasn’t saying not to have fun or not enjoy, by all means go. It’s just not a measure of the hobby that’s all.