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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;PlanoSteve, post: 3063587, member: 91609&quot;]Well, I guess I&#039;ll chime in here...</p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t believe that back in the day someone said &quot;Hey, let&#039;s figure out a way to remove money from people&#039;s pockets &amp; put it in our pockets &amp; have them do it willingly....&amp; you know what, coin collectors are ripe for the pickings!&nbsp; Let&#039;s start a grading &amp; slabbing system to make them think were adding value to their coins.&quot;</p><p><br /></p><p>No, I believe the idea had a noble beginning.&nbsp; And authentication is certainly a nice feature regardless of the condition of the coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>But there are problems that arise:</p><p><br /></p><p>There are at least 50 thousand ways to collect, whether it&#039;s complete series, or only Morgan&#039;s, or type sets, or only commemoratives, or only moderns, or only ancients and some of those in severely narrow bands (not being critical here), or (apparently) only cents (OK, pennies) since 1992 <img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie85" alt=":smuggrin:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />,.....you get the idea.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyone who has been following CT threads can readily see that it&#039;s very rare to have a consensus on many of the things that come up for opinion...but it is great to share ideas, dialog, and different opinions because we are indeed humanity, &amp; we love to learn &amp; teach.&nbsp; But this idea about the value &amp; integrity of &quot;grading &amp; TPG&#039;s&quot; has about the widest range of opinions as any.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, given this, the TPG&#039;s are between a rock &amp; a hard place.&nbsp; And I think part of the problem is that it is too inexpensive (read:&nbsp; they don&#039;t charge enough) to grade.&nbsp; If slabbing started at something like $50 or $60 per coin you wouldn&#039;t have every Tom, Dick &amp; Harry (well, I&#039;m sure other would do it too, but these guys are always the instigators) slabbing tons of coins.&nbsp; The way it is going, it seems the TPG&#039;s are being inundated with submissions, and of course they make mistakes.&nbsp; And they have to add qualified graders &amp; good luck with that, as evidenced by the wide variances in opinions here when asked to grade a coin (OK, I realize you don&#039;t have it in hand, but still...)</p><p><br /></p><p>And have you read the discussions (read: complaints) about whether bullion coins are 69&#039;s or 70&#039;s!!!&nbsp; Sheesh!!!</p><p><br /></p><p>So they get more submissions, we require (read: want) them to get cheaper &amp; faster, yet we complain about pricing, accuracy, &amp; nit pick grading, but have no regard for the difficulty in learning to grade, the time/experience factor.&nbsp; I dare say that there are few of us here who are really qualified or experienced enough to really do it.</p><p><br /></p><p>No, aside from authentication, the main thing that slabbing attempts to accomplish is to level the playing field....that (thanks to the internet) someone on one side of the globe can buy a slab from someone on the other side of the globe &amp; have a certain degree of comfort in the subjective &quot;grade&quot;.&nbsp; Unfortunately, this doesn&#039;t work because it is all SUBJECTIVE. </p><p><br /></p><p>So while collectors now have the advantage of reaching virtually every other collector on the planet....we cannot agree on grades or the virtues of TPG&#039;s.&nbsp; I find it difficult to pin this problem mostly on TPG&#039;s, which again I believe to be a noble but flawed exercise. </p><p><br /></p><p>And for the record, of the couple of thousand coins in my possession, I only have about 35 slabs.</p><p><br /></p><p>OK, people, we&#039;re done here, move along.....<img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie50" alt=":happy:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /><img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie50" alt=":happy:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" /><img src="styles/default/xenforo/clear.png" class="mceSmilieSprite mceSmilie50" alt=":happy:" unselectable="on" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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