1976 3-Piece Proof Set

Lol, that's funny! They grew wild on an acre of land that my dad owned so picking and eating was fun. In the sixties it was also profitable.

 

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There's not a lot of demand except at the wholesale level. The typical LCS will have two or three of these but might not display them. Every six months or a year they'll package up all their mint and proof sets and send them off to wholesalers or jobbers. The sets then mostly end up for promotions, TV sales, and fodder for sale on the net.

There are other avenues by which such sets end up getting sold but the bulk of sets still come from estates and are purchased by the LCS.

There are also increasing sales of this kind of coin at estate sales and flea markets. The public has a voracious appetite for these coins and are always on the lookout for what they perceive is a "good deal".

I've long warned that a lot of moderns that are eschewed by collectors are going into the hands of the general public and this is accelerating as the total supply of coins is crashing. The public is probably not putting these coins into safe storage and coaxing them out of their hands might prove rather difficult. When specific demand for something like the 40% silver bicentennial set emerges there will no longer be much supply because it's already been "allocated" elsewhere. Old coins are generally not in the hands of the public. For every nice XF '24-D cent owned by a non-collector there are 50 or 80 in collections and safety deposit boxes. But for every '76 40% set owned by the public collectors own only about half of one.

This will prove for "interesting" markets in the future no matter what prices they bring.

It will prove even more interesting when collectors wake up and find something like an MS-65 1984 cent with nice surfaces and no carbon spots are actually rare. There were very few around in 1985 but most have grown carbon spots. Now most of the mint sets are gone and many of the survivors were bought on Home Shopping Network.

We certainly live in interesting times.

 

Perhaps "underappreciated" or "unloved" would have been a better word than "underrated" but my premise was (and is) that it is an attractive and worthy set that's often overlooked by collectors of U.S. coinage. On that I think we agree.

 

I would the 1976 sets appreciate but I doubt it. I've got a bunch of the 3-piece silver sets; proof and UNC.

 

I also love this set and the uncirculated set and have several of both. Plus it’s my birth year.

You can find many buy-it-now of the silver proof set on Ebay for $21.50-$22.00. So that’s the going rate. It was down under 15 bucks a few short years ago.