Got a strange notice that PCGS is retiring my old customer number at the end of the year and have stated what the new one will be. Old one was 6 digits; new one is 8. Maybe they have or had 1 million (900 k if they don’t want numbers less than 6 digits) customers and are running out of numbers. 8 digits will allow a billion (900 million if they don’t want numbers less than 8 digits). Mike
Weird. They could keep all the old numbers and just add two digits to their database for when they go above a million. Maybe there's some other reasoning.
Yeah, my first impulse would've been "convert all the old customer numbers by prepending 00", followed by "or by prepending 10 if you're very very stupid about how you display leading zeroes". Maybe they want to avoid the "prestige effect" of low customer numbers representing longer-time customers. Not sure why they'd want to do that, though.
And they're going to have to keep a table of old and new numbers so they can connect the customers to their history. Which means they can still look you up by your old number if they wanted to. Unless they're going to do some sort of global search and replace, which would be fraught with disaster. Oh well, they're not begging for my consultation.
