It seems that the mint will lower prices on their silver products http://mintnewsblog.com/2013/06/price-decrease-for-gold-and-platinum-products-silver-possible/
I appreciate that the mint has to make money but the silver prices have been far to high for the past year. So much so that I have quit purchasing any of the 5oz. products since the first of the 2012 items. I could no longer justify purchasing them so this item is off my buying radar. In fact I have also drastically reduced the quantity of ASE proofs. I can well imagine that other people have done the same.
Their gold eagles have always had a price float based on the market. You can see how the calculate the prices here: http://catalog.usmint.gov/wcsstore/ConsumerDirect/images/catalog/en_US/PMPricingGrid.pdf Basically they look at the closing price of gold for a given week and compare it to the trend and adjust pricing based on bands. I guess they never did the same for silver because the dollar range (price per ounce) was never volatile enough.
