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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Sallent, post: 3553161, member: 76194&quot;]Part of the reason I dislike slabbing is what it did to the prices of American coins. Before slab companies were a thing, you look at US catalogs and coins we&#039;re priced in several categories: Good, Fine, Very Fine, About Uncirculated, and Uncirculated. The price gaps between them weren&#039;t really that exorbitant either. Then if you look at catalogs after slabbing came in, all of the sudden there is a huge spike at the higher end, and a coin that would have sold for $70 in &quot;Uncirculated Condition&quot; might all of the sudden be worth $75 as MS-64, $120 as MS-65, $200 as MS-66, $350 as MS-67. And likewise I think it&#039;s depressed the other categories. Now if a coin is not worth slabbing, well, it&#039;s not really worth collecting. Especially when most collectors today will not buy a coin unless it&#039;s in a slab.</p><p><br /></p><p>I think&nbsp; of that&#039;s part reason why US coins are so overpriced, and don&#039;t seem like a good deal compared to many world coins that have not been subject to the slabbing craze. Slabbing has turned a hobby into a commodity, allowing investors to come in and buy coins they don&#039;t know anything about simply because it has an MS-65 or MS-66 label, and at the highest end the price gaps between each MS point has become exorbitant, while your VF, or F coins (unless rare) have languished as the red headed stepchild nobody wants. Many are simply tossed away into &quot;junk silver&quot; piles, to be melted or stored away in bags just for the metal content.</p><p><br /></p><p>I see the same thing happening with Heritage Auctions and ancients. How else do you explain why an Athenian Tet that was at best $2000 raw, sold for $30,000+ because of an MS* label?&nbsp; Or how the $30 &quot;MS-65&quot; coin we were tracking in a thread here and making fun of, ended up selling for hundreds of dollars because of the MS tag.&nbsp; You see the same with coins that get a VF or lower rating, they are usually sold cheap on eBay, sometimes lower than raw would get, because no one wants them. The MS mentality is creeping into our hobby. I wonder how long it will be before the threads in this form go from &quot;I want to learn more about this coin&quot;, or &quot;This coin might have a hole or a countermark, but it is historically fascinating because of ......&quot; to simply &quot;Disaster, I sent this in to certify MS but it came back AU&quot;, or &quot;Is this raw coin an MS? Is it worth buying or not?&quot;, or &quot;Here are the results from my submissions for slabbing.&quot;[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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