2016 Mercury

The ONLY difference is that someone GIFTED the third party grader fifteen bucks to print the sentence on the label. It's a worthless designation and in my opinion we should all quit paying for it.
I suppose it helps the big time dealers that have made a deal to have it printed for a lot less than the $15 the rest of us pay when we send in small or medium or even large orders in. Of course "large" is a relative thing. The big dealers like MCM and even some smaller dealers send many hundreds and thousands of coins in at a bulk rate. When people buy a coin they'll pick the one that has early release over the one that doesn't have it, so the huge dealers have a big advantage. It's a worthless designation but people will still pick the label that has it over the one that doesn't.

 

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The first 110,000 customers already have a legitimate gripe. The coin was poorly-struck and of poor quality. I bought a couple for myself. Both were poorly struck, both were badly finned, and one had a planchet defect in the field on the obverse. I was planning on collecting the set of 3, but at that point, I just sold them both and went for the Daniel Carr silver rounds instead.

 

Basically means it was graded within the first 30 days or someone kept them in a box from the mint with a shipping date in the first 30 days before sending that to the TPG.

Some do carry a premium in the market and you are right for the same price people almost always pick it over a plain label. But yea there aren't a lot of issues where you could conceivably say it was struck first

 

Heck, even the MINT THEMSELVES caution people that when the Mint first makes the coins first available for sale that they pull and ship the coins in no particular order as far as the order they were minted in. Someone posted the exact wording on here just the other day. When the mint slyly tells you it's a worthless designation we should take heed.

 

Are they poorly struck or was the design just done poorly? Based on the digital images on the mint's website...I don't really even see full bands on the reverse. It's almost like they aren't really there in the design.

 

Combination of both imo

 

They don't. And the Mint says it doesn't.

 

How can you poorly strike gold? It's as soft as a pillow

 

I sent in a small order for grading the other day. Out of the 14 coins that I sent in, 2 were San Francisco Set Eagles in a first strike eligible mint sealed box and 10 were 5 sets of 2014 Kennedy 50th anv. Clad High Relief that was also in a first strike eligible mint sealed box. I specifically put on the order form that they were first strike eligible but not to but that on there if there was a charge for it. They came back without it, of course. I know the special blue labels that say early release have a fee but I thought maybe they'd at least print it in black ink for free, but NOPE! The eagles were both 69's and the clad Kennedy's were a disaster with mostly 66 & 67's. For those specific 12 coins it would have cost me $180 and not even worth $18 total to have it on all the labels. Not worth one tenth of what they would have charged me. First strike/early release designation is a sore subject for me!

 

Everyone else is wondering the same thing and one of the reason why people were so turned off by the dime. The WLH looks like they did a much better job with the quality.

 

Poorly aligned dies, but also the design was poorly done. As you say, gold is soft and should strike well. All they had to do was make sure the bands were strong on the dime, the head was full on the quarter, and the hand was full on the half. They finally got it right on the WLH, but too little too late. Not many would want to just collect the half, especially at what they are charging.

 

The big boys definitely have the advantage when going for it. 70s are really the only place the ever add that premium and usually the largest ones are when the mint has extremely delayed order fulfillment. I've done it here or there on certain things that seemed to ship slow but generally avoid it given the added cost across the whole submission. I've never tried with a sealed box though, I have gotten to many duds from the mint not to inspect everything before deciding what to send in or if anything needs to be returned.

 

Well, I slept right through the re-release (actually was dealing with a work crisis). How long did they take to sell out?

 

It lasted a couple hours I think, remarkable considering it was less than 9,000 coins. It was limited to 1 per household with previous orders counting towards that limit. So if you ordered one or ten before, you could not buy again. This basically excluded any dealers who already bought unless they created new accounts.

 

oh bummer, I forgot about it.
But I did buy some ASEs and a couple 20 Trillion dollar 4oz silver bars for Christmas gifts for roughly the same price as that tiny gold dime.

 

The Mint managed.