Very few people other than Ikes collectors appreciate how difficult it is to assemble nice attractive sets of these coins because most of them were made with significant defects in strike and die condition. Then large percentages of them were mauled in the handling equipment. Some of these coins were even put through machines like cement mixers to knock down wire rims so entire brand new bags often look like really badly made VF's. Some dates are so tough it's incredible that they are available at all. The '71 comes awful and the'76 type I can be just as bad. Those who try to get the latter coin from a mint set will find only one set in 12 contains a specimen that was well made and attractive and almost all of these will require an acetone bath because the plastic for this date isn't stable.
I was setting aside Gems all through the'70's of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars but I ignored the Ikes. Sure I liked Ike but every coin was flawed. I'd get some fresh BU rolls or a stack of mint sets and there were no Gems. I figured there were enough Ike collectors that they could save the chBU coins. But I was wrong about everything. These coins weren't being set aside in significant numbers and there were some Gems if you just looked hard enough. I stumbled on my very first Gem Ike in 1979. It was a '78-P in a mint set. The coins are still out there today but it's not so easy to find sets because of decades of benign neglect and destruction caused by the ultralow price. These sets came into coin shops in estates and the dealers couldn't sell the sets so they cut them up and put the coins in the cash register; millions upon countless millions of them. Of course a few have been collected and fewer still have been cut up to grade a coin in the set but most have been unceremoniously dumped into circulation whether they were common, Gem, or a variety. Modern markets are really hard to figure but the bottom line is the demand is so tiny that even in aggregate it is smaller than the surviving population of 1975 mint sets. When a collector discovers he can fill the hole with the Ike from a '75 mint set another set is gone and the collector figures he can always upgrade to a nicer coin later if he got a tarnished ugly slug. Curiously the '75 set and many others spiked way higher in price a couple years back because the supplies are being stressed. But even here is a two (3) tier market. Typical sets that are tarnished and have no remarkable coins in them are difficult to sell unless they are with a few nicer sets. Nicer sets bring premiums. There is still no real wholesale market for coins like this. There's not even a wholesale market for typical ugly Ikes. There's not enough demand that the few sellers can't just cut up one of the few surviving mint sets.
