U.S. Mint Website Suggestions

Sorry, krispy, but I was just trying to say that like a bridge over troubled water, the Mint "will ease your mind" as indicated by Deputy Director Peterson in the above press release.

 

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Ugh... you're makin' me gag! LOL

 

While I agree with much of what you've stated Chris, I'm not going to shoot myself in the hip and cancel that order. I don't believe I'll ever have the chance to purchase them in the aftermarket for equal or less than what I'm paying for them now. If it were anything else I'd probably follow your advice. For now, patience is a virtue.......gnashing teeth........patience is a virtue.

 

My suggestion to the U.S. Mint:

Forget your web site. Outsource it to experts, and then focus 100% of your energy on repairing the tarnished (pun intended) image of U.S. coinage.

 

Patience is necessary dealing with the Mint's given their current operating scheme with taking orders and postponing delivery, but patience, the doing of nothing, will not change the situation people are complaining about. The very time to voice dissatisfaction by canceling an order is to do it when they (the Mint) thinks they have an absolute sell out winner on their hands. That's when you have to resist the urge the most, not to buy, and leave them holding the 'bag' and coins they thought they'd sell, forcing them to recognize the power of the consumer, not just the profit taken like candy from a baby from the consumer.

I know you all love coins so much and are having a really hard time understanding this, but if you are complaining about something or suggesting a change but unwilling to refuse to do business with the Mint until effective changes have been made, you really have no ground to stand on making a complaint. You can't agree with me and do the same thing you normally do and expect your voice to be heard.

Stop buying the Mint's products, directly from them AND don't buy from dealers or other sellers later on. That's how you send your message. Can't say it any clearer than that really.

 

I think the US Mint has the most reputable minting standards and highest demand of any country. One ounce ASEs carry a premium over 1oz Maple Leafs, as well 1oz silver bullion from just about every other country on the planet (save the ones where the US Mint produces the coins on their behalf).

Boycotting all US Mint coins to send a message about their distribution capabilities (or lack thereof) is a rather myopic approach in my opinion.

 

I'm not disputing their minting standards at all. I even said earlier in this thread that they do minting very well.

Boycotting the Mint is the only way to get them to listen because their customer surveys offer no platform for suggestions and the US Mint unlike many other world mints does not have an open dialog forum or blog to directly interact with it's customer base.

Furthermore, the boycott concept is a direct trigger to catch their attention and the first thing that will suffer is their ad-budget, which has been increasing with rebranding the website in recent years, churning out arbitrary anniversary release coins year after year and now this junk tote bag.

Where most complaints in this and other threads originate from is not the minting nor physical operations at the Mint itself, but rather the agents they employ, PR and advertising and a poor choice of order fulfillment firms.

How many years has the Mint promised they are investigating and improving the website, and yet upon every hyped coin release, they can't handle the site traffic. They certainly have no problem preparing coins to sell at coin shows on release day to advertise themselves and send their PR reps to the coin shows to massage the show attendees, but they have shifting delivery dates weeks and months out for online orders.

It's unacceptable and particularly poor customer appreciation for such a loyal customer base.

 

I think they are simply producing based on demand, especially for more niche products. Why mint 500,000 of the new HOF coin when there is only demand for 100,000? And you don't know demand until orders come in. So yes, I think that they push delivery dates out so that they can feel comfortable that they will not over-produce. Part of the reason why they have a subscription service at a 10% discount - so they will better know the future demand.

I have no facts to back up the above statements, so pick it apart if you like. But intuitively that's what I would do if I ran the mint. Maybe I should apply....

Have their been any disaster coins by the mint in the past? A coin(s) that they over-produced and there was not nearly enough demand for?

 

The public didn't buy all of the 2009 UHR gold coins and after some months melted down tens of thousands of units. I think it was over 60k units melted and remade into blanks for other products.

I don't think such coins are a disaster since the materials can be reused. Certainly they regularly have to do this with many products, but it shouldn't be so hard to have read a significant amount of coins, ready for delivery as orders flood in on the first days of a hotly anticipated coin release. Their marketing drives the hype and from past experience they should be able to adjust to meet a good amount of that demand. I don't fault them for not producing hundreds of thousands of clad HoF coins in advance, but in many cases those are shipping ahead of the gold and silver coins that are minted to much smaller allowed mintages and were a known sell out by most collectors and dealers who don't work for the Mint.

A recent disaster or two might be attributed to the Federal Reserve ordering massive amounts of golden dollar coins, and 2013(?) Kennedy half dollar coins. In such cases the Mint's circulating coin demand could have investigated such large order requests before running the coin presses, only to have so many warehouses now full of them.

 

I'll play with this, but I think my browser settings are okay. Every other site I've selected remember me, reloads my user name. Does anyone else have success with this feature on the mint's site?

 

Krispy, I understand what you’re saying about boycotting the mint. I agree with this tactic in many situations and it has worked in the past when dealing with benevolent dictator types. I don’t know if it will work with the mint/coins. Not all will boycott, so we could windup with record low mintages that skyrocket in the after market, leaving all those who boycotted out of huge profits. What prevents many from boycotting the mint and the secondary market? Greed.

 

First off, I would suggest that it not be called the USMINT.GOV since its NOT the US Mint that you're dealing with. You're dealing with an out sourced agency which works solely as a retain outlet for products produced by the United States Mint.

As such, that outlet is subject to the same bally-wick that all of us get from our government. Lack of Communications (they are after all, only a retail outlet), lack of reasonable planning (given the lack of communication) and a lack of responsibility toward the customer. (Us).

Instead of contracting the process out, I would prefer dealing with the US Mint where I could feel the my feedback actually meant something and where the feedback would actually have a chance on making an impact.

 

I’ll tell you, my best experience with the mint lately was the order I placed on the phone at the Denver Mint gift shop. Very pleasant lady, who actually knew something.

 

I put "Don't sell coins that you don't have. If you can't accurately determine how many you need to mint, factoring in returns, you have no business selling them in the first place. " I also added " if an item is backordered, be honest about the fulfillment date, and don't keep people hanging on with false hopes."

 

U.S. Mint Website Suggestions:

Close the site.

 

The gift shops are also private companies that contract with the mint, they are not run by the mint.

That leaves two options, mint to order (take all the orders, and then strike that many coins. But that could still be viewed and selling coins they don't have.) or stop selling coins to collectors altogether. Oh third option reduce mintages to a small fraction of what they are today so you can strike them all ahead of time because you KNOW you will have an sell out. (That one has the advantage of everything being a winner on the aftermarket.) Of course that will mean that everyone will try and rush the ordering period and almost everyone will miss out because they will almost instantly sell out, but shipping will be swift and those that missed out will be able to pay multiples of the issue price on the aftermarket very shortly instead of having to wait for their coins.

 

I like it and I've thought about an option similar to your third option before. I think it's the best possible option given the kinds of problems the size of customer demand and order fulfillment has run into and the desire collectors have to see aftermarket sales become profitable. A smaller mintage also offers the best justification for the very high aftermarket prices, and those values could be sustained with less coins being minted.

The difference I've considered would be to scrap the current order taking concept that just because a customer places an order they get a coin(s). Instead, I imagined something like the GSA dollars ordering system, that is, customers submit an "order request" but, fulfillment depends upon the available supply doled out in a kind of raffle or lottery system, from the pool of order requests.

Under this scheme, something similar to the mint-to-demand order opportunity would exist for a period of time. Anyone could place an "order request" during that period of time, but with significantly reduced mintages, there would be a strict household limit of one enforced.

Just like buying a State lottery ticket, customers would have a cut-off date to get a ticket before the drawing was held. After the period of order requests closed and redundant order request sorted out to create a pool of unique order requests, drawing for the available minted supply would be held.

A rough example of this might be, a special coin is to be released with a mintage of just 5,000 coins, and an order window will be open for 3 months to allow customers to place one order request per confirmed unique Mint customer account with email, billing and shipping addresses matching. Delivery would be enforced to the mailing address on the account and to who billing is verified to each customer. The result could be that the Mint receives a vast pool of customers many times more than the mintage figure. A drawing is then held at the conclusion of the order window of opportunity and all order numbers published online for customers to confirm they've "won" and will be billed and receiving a coin. It shouldn't matter whether the entire mintage was struck or not, and the Mint should be able to provide precise details on delivery dates the way other large online retailers do.

From a PR event perspective the drawing for order fulfillment could be done online via a LIVE streaming YouTube channel feed and resemble something like State lotteries, which have those televised ping-pong ball style lottery machine drawings after the evening news broadcast live.

Of course, any given scheme will have some who loose and some who win. There has become increased unfairness in order fulfillment, that is heavily tilted towards insiders, dealers and show attendees, which only hurts the direct marketing side of Mint collector products and customer interest in the products as well as what any product depends upon, customer loyalty to a brand, the Mint brand. Certainly, there will always persist those seek and find ways how to profit more than others in the aftermarket, but I feel, enough isn't being done to make access to the opportunity to do that fair and equal to all those interested in obtaining and trading coins in this niche of the coin hobby/industry.

 

Chris? That ain't gonna solve a thing and there's gonna be even more crying from collectors who will say that they never win in the lottery and the lottery is slanted toward the big sellers and I just stubbed my toe........

 

Well Ken, as we know there's no one way to satisfy everyone all the time... There seems to be no perfect democracy, but trying to do something to maintain the fairest level of distribution, is my idea.

Do the millons of loosers who play the State lotteries bemoan this much on public forums that they don't win and ask why and ask for changes? No. They keep playing and trying to win.