I've been watching the daily counter on the US mint site for the 2012 ASE set. I started thinking, why doesn't the mint include this counter on its entire product line? They must know the count since it eventually gets published somewhere. Also, why don't they display the count of all current and prior years on a page on their website that is easy to find (mintage tab)? I know you can find the information on coinnews or somewhere else but not easily on the mint's website or a total listing. It is also nice that they display the end date for sales of the 2012 ASE set. Can they not include this date on other products where they know the end date?
I think that counter is how many ORDERS they have. That series is set to only mint what is ordered in a certain, very short, time frame. So it is different that their usual runs. The number I want to know is how many minted, not how many ordered. In this case they are one and the same. But, all that said, I agree, it would be GREAT to have mintage counters and length of run information for everything. As to the quality of their web site, Your government dollars at work. OHHH would I like to make a political comment right now, but I bite my tongue, and bow to the wisdom of CT rules.
Give it time. This is something new and this is the first item they have used the counter and end date on. If it works out well they many start including it on other items. I'd rather see it on one item at a time while they make sure they have the bugs worked out on it than just jump in and use it everywhere only to have a flaw bring everything down.
I agree with you that it would be nice to know this info. However, I would not hold your breath. The mint is a lot of things but transparent is not one of them. TC
Each time you are prompted to take a survey from the US Mint, these are the sorts of ideas you should be proposing to them in the "other" comments boxes when given the chance. The Mint isn't likely to answer our comments on such a forum or ever see customers ideas buried in all these threads. I agree that it would be more convenient to have this sort of information published and controlled by the Mint rather than distributed through weekly sales reports published via U.S. Mint Press Releases, which are then republished by any number of blog writers and numismatic journals and guides. The Mint too should get with the program of communicating with its customers directly and have some sort of interaction with customers on their own web site. There are many ideas that the Mint simply is loosing money on by not keeping its customers satisfied, closer to home and nearer to ordering its products as well as failing to understand the hobby its customers engage in, especially when it comes to the numismatic products they create for us. BTW, I have written the same comments and suggestions in previous surveys and letters of suggestion, so I have taken my own advice to do just that. One problem with reporting mintage numbers as orders are placed is that you are actually being cited confirmed sales, not really mintages, as the mintage of current products remains in flux but orders may be cancelled returned and items subsequently destroyed for being damaged and returned/exchanged by customers. It's a big difference that I see many modern collectors get all confused thinking about. Mintages typically are not finalized until some time, months or even a few years, after a given product or dated coin has stopped being minted. Mintage figures continue to be adjusted up and down on a monthly basis, both during and after minting of any given piece stops. Guide books like the Red Book don't even publish figures for most new coins for the past couple years for this reason. As I've point to the example of the 2009 UHR $20 gold coin before, a large quantity of coins were actually minted, unsold and later destroyed. An equally large amount of prepared blanks for the coins also were scraped. These numbers were not part of the final mintage, but 85,000 more had been minted, while a total tally of 115,178 were actually sold and later determined to be the mintage of this piece. This is an article that was published in Coin World (Vol. 52, Issue 2649 by Amos Publishing) in the 1/17/2011 issue, that detailed the 2009 UHR mintage figure:
The Mint may also not wish to publish these numbers so readily alongside all products if they find collectors start to shun products based on mintage levels increasing. That hurts their profit, the Mint's profit, and becomes a costly enterprise to maintain. Products become harder to sell, and demand wouldn't really be 'demand' in the same sense if the market became so finicky. In such a case, the Mint might revert to very slim limited mintages, more like what other world mint's produce in terms of 5k, 10k and such lower mintage limits to special coin releases. That wouldn't bode well for the size of the U.S. modern coin collecting market either. Some information the U.S. Mint may not wish to publish or make less accessible for just these reasons. After all, we collect coins, and less so mintage statistics. Mintage obviously helps us to understand rarity, but with modern production levels, none of what comes out of the U.S. Mint is really all that rare. At some point chasing numbers from press releases gets rather tedious and less about the coins and the hobby than some other obsessive thing to meddle about while were waiting for some other product to roll out.
I would much rather have accurate info from the mint that trying to rely on threads in which people post their order number and try to predict sell out times. The mint has been mysterious is recent years, pulling products unexpectedly, discontinuing production of products, etc. leaving many collectors unhappy. I guarantee you that if they put a counter on slow sellers like the collector pucks that people would take notice and start buying them. Statistics are part of collecting. I am just one of those people that likes more information...maybe I stand alone. TC
I think you missed my point about following the sales figures. That is not the same thing as mintage. Accurate information only comes long after the coins are no longer for sale direct from the Mint and the Mint publishes the final figures, until then the numbers can and do fluctuate significantly. More information during the current year of minting and sales will only compound your confusion. Of course, I said, mintage is part of collecting, determining rarity and so on, but placing a counter as a marketing gimmick to sell slow movers isn't producing rarities, it's producing profits for the Mint and all those mysteries to collectors about what's going are, why some things are pulled and others discontinued, has a lot more to do with marketing, and what we should try to extract standing between us and the Mint than supposed mintage figures based on sales reports that are anything but final. Once again, as I said above, at some point chasing numbers is less about the coins and the hobby than it is about some other obsessive thing some collectors do while waiting for the next product to roll out. The slow moving ATB 5 oz. series has more problems due to incredibly poor marketing strategy (occurring right as the Mint Director exited stage left for the corporate world) and wholly inexcusable accessibility to buying the coins once they were finally allowed to be sold, leaving open the door for hype and greed which stirred collectors into wanting something that many quickly realized they didn't have the budgets to maintain a collection of all these new 5 oz. coins. Something which would require people to put out some $20k over the course of the series just to collect them all. Why put a sales odometer on something just to imply it's limited? That's a gimmick to make some customers feel a given product is about to run out and that they must have it! While others will see a static number and ignore making the purchase, thinking it's not popular enough to buy. We can already do these things by following sales figures in the current way they get reported. Collector behavior is what is transparent and that's why the U.S. Mint is so successful at turning a profit on collectors of it's products.
Why does it always come down to mintage and "rarity"? The Mint could produce a silver-plated turd with a limited mintage and some idiots would want it. God forbid anybody would ever think of owning a coin for the beauty and creativity of its design or its outstanding production quality. Instead, all attention is focused on Silver Eagle rehashes and other icons of non-creativity. Sigh.
