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Message:: [QUOTE="brg5658, post: 2401501, member: 29751"]I think we'd all be surprised and disturbed by how much the "TPGs" who were originally created to "protect" the consumers from buying wildly overgraded coins from unscrupulous dealers -- are now the basis for huge amounts of the income for dealers.  The TPGs registry sets, constant regrading, sometimes wild inconsistency, and continual upward slope to "gradeflation" are filling the pockets of dealers. In the "olden days" you could discuss with a dealer when you thought he had a coin graded or priced too high.  Now, many dealers think that a coin is what the label says it is.  In their minds, all MS65s are created equal, and if anything, you should pay a bit higher because in their opinion the TPG was too "harsh" on the coin, and it's really a "such and such" grade higher.  What's on the label has become the "lower bound" for possible grading and discussion about pricing.  In my opinion, the pendulum has swung far too extreme to the "dealer's favor" when the mentality seems to be that TPGs are infallible.  The only cure I have found for this rampant and more common idiocy is patience. There are still some reasonable dealers out there - who are honest, truly collector centered, and all around good guys.  The problem is, the kind of dealers who are now using TPGs to justify ignorance are far more common. /Rant over/[/QUOTE]