I understand grading uncirculated coins and worn key dates, but I do not understand this. Why? I've found better looking war nickels in circulation! I hate sales gimmicks/trinkets.
I feel this was probably sent in by a big resell company. They send these bulk orders in and get them backup without numerical grades. I've seen all kinds of coins in these genuine holders.
Someone did a massive bulk submission and got a special label. Quickly hopping around NGC verify there are at least 400 each of them in the 8681346 through 8681349 cert prefixes, all with just the Genuine designation, so that's over 1500 war nickels. Originally someone's late night infomercial perhaps? Lots of similar gimmicks have gone through NGC.
It is rather tacky. But there is an 11-year-old kid that I know (been helping him with his coin collection), who would love that. He's a huge WW2 history buff. Not that I'd ever spend 35 bucks to get that for him. I did go on eBay and buy him one of those sets of Nazi coins that came with two Hitler stamps. His mother (my supervisor at work) was OK with that. She knows he's a history buff and not a budding skinhead or Neo-Nazi.
I understand that. I would have been the same way at 12! I just don't understand why, if you are going to slab a very common coin, not at least get something AU+? Each to their own. I recently cracked open quite a few plastic cases with worn, common Indian cents and V nickels.
I would imagine the answer to that question is in the volume. If you're gonna do a mass promotion like that, and you're going to be submitting hundreds of coins, are you likely to pick all high quality AU+ pieces to submit? Nahh. Too expensive in volume, and too time consuming to pick out the "nicer" stuff. And a lot of the TV-ad-watching general public who are the target audience of these promotions wouldn't know the difference anyway.
