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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 7362173, member: 68&quot;]Let me say this another way.</p><p><br /></p><p>The largest group of &#039;73 mint sets I was ever able to check at one time was at a dealer in Indianapolis who had about 500 nice fresh sets back around 1978.&nbsp;&nbsp; From these I bought about five sets that were mixed and matched so they each had Gem P and D packets and a couple odd balls and no envelopes.&nbsp; I paid a premium price for these for the privilege of cherry picking them.&nbsp; If I remember correctly there were only four or five nice gemmy Ikes with a weak&nbsp; MS-66 and a few MS-65.&nbsp; There were some great quarters and a top notch Denver nickel.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Now you might be thinking the 500 rejects have been a drag on the market for the last half century but this isn&#039;t the way it probably worked.&nbsp; Each of these 500 sets had a high probability of being destroyed.&nbsp; Very few people even bought one set in those days so odds are a few were sold to walk in customers but 95% of them ended up being shipped to a wholesaler and cut up within the next few years.&nbsp;&nbsp; They may have wholesaled a few themselves but in those days this was pretty uncommon.&nbsp; Those sold to wholesalers are almost all cut up.&nbsp; Most maintain a significant inventory of sets but they get in far more than can be sold as sets.&nbsp; So the sets are randomly cut up to make BU rolls.&nbsp; This is the source of most BU clad rolls because nobody set aside most dates.&nbsp; These BU rolls are primarily used to make date and mintmark sets and sold to the general public or on television.&nbsp; They used to be sold in the backs of the coin papers as well.&nbsp; Indeed a few companies even sold them in ads throughout the paper.&nbsp; There were actually roll sellers in the classified and these were original rolls but sales even in aggregate over many years were quite low.&nbsp; These sellers told me that even back in the &#039;70&#039;s they couldn&#039;t put together a single roll set without calling several of their customers to get the key dates.&nbsp; One told me he sold less than two bags of 1969 quarters in the first seven years before sales dried up and he took the rest to the bank.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The average 1973 mint set in 1978 had a 65% chance of being destroyed by now.&nbsp; But the sets that were picked over had a 90% chance of being destroyed.&nbsp; This leaves a lot of original sets in dealer inventories and most of them are at the corner coin shops.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve picked over sets at wholesalers a little bit but generally speaking a lot of their sets are already picked over.&nbsp; Wholesalers have been picking over their own sets for a long time.&nbsp; They do it so quickly they miss a lot of coins but they do it.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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