May of us order coins of the web. What is the strangest way someone packed your coin. Mine would have to be a GSA Morgan shipped in a yogurt box. dd:
LOL!!!!!!!! Did the Morgan smell like yogurt? When I used to buy on ebay one seller sent me a loose IHC in an envelope with nothing else. Another seller taped an IHC to a piece of paper and put it in an envelope and mailed it. (Both coins weren't inside flips)
The best, well it wasn't a coin, it was a banknote taped inside the envelope, the banknote was not expensive but obviously the ebay seller was an idiot.
Not a word of a lie, this one ebay seller stuffed my Canadian nickel dollar inside a womans sanitary mini pad, that was put inside a standard letter size envelope. I couldn't believe it, when I wrote him back he told me he ran out of padded envelopes, and thought this would work as well. Can you imagine?????? Let me see if i can find the ebay email and post it for you. Update, it looks like ebay may have deleted it, it was last year. Such a shame.
I also got a fugio shipped in a water bill envelope. Another weird one was when I got a coin shipped in a deposit envelope wrapped up in a real estate catalog shipped in an envelope. dd:
How about lack of packing? I got a large lot (about 4,000 coins, I think) of Jefferson nickels just loose in a flat-rate priority mail box. The bummer is that many of them were sorted by date in rolls, all of which had broken open, so I had a heck of a time re-sorting them. Recently, I got a ton of proof and mint sets that were also just thrown loose in a box. They were all torn up when I got them. I complained to the seller, and he said that's the way he received them when he bought them. He did say that he would send me something to make up for my trouble, though. Then, a week later, I got a huge box, filled with all manner of packing material, and inside were four dollar-sized silver coins, all individually wrapped to insanity. It took me about 5 minutes to unwrap each one through all the layers of tape and other packing material.
That's be tape for me. 30 or so euro coins tapped to cardboard... luckily, this tape was so weak that the glue only transferred to a half dozen coins. And besides, it was all pocket change anyway.
I received a couple of packages from Asia awhile back... One was pair of brick sized packages all wrapped up in foil... That turned more then a few heads when I opened up the envelope at work, I'll tell ya. Another seller sent me a package wrapped in many many layers of paper, including two or three sheets of carbon paper. It didn't get on the coins, but what a mess it made during unpacking!
I recieved some coins that were oddly packed but I thought it was a good idea so I have used it for shipping circulated coins discretely. You take a piece of corrugated card board and cut a slit to make three sides of a square and pull back the outer layer on the cardboard. Then pull out the corrugated part and place the coin inside and lay the flap back down and tape it. Put the cardbaord in and envelope and there is no trace of coins inside. works well for worn coins, but the uncs always go in a flip or 2x2.
i just got an envelope the other day with 10 coins taped to cardboard, only 4 of them were in 2x2s, but they were just some wheats and 1/2s
I usually dont sell raw coins on eBay but when I do I ship them in a bubble mailer and the coins are always in flips!! You can get bubble mailers on eBay for less then $0.15 a piece!! I also hate getting coins in just envelopes.
Not really weird packaging, but... A few years ago I had a dealer FedEx a 1792 Getz "half dollar" to me to look at. (At the time it was a $4200 coin. Much more than that now - wish I had bought it.) I knew I wouldn't be at home to sign for it so I had him ship it to my work address. But, my employer is an information management company, so all inbound FedEx shipments go through "data control" for logging. The coin was in a flip, LOOSE in the FedEx envelope. Data control peaked into the envelope, didn't see any tape cartridges, or anything else, and chunked it into the dumpster. After many phone calls and a prolonged dumpster-diving session I found it. Never told the dealer and I'll never make that mistake again.
mine was tape.. i got this small shipment of coins from this yuck on the other side of this little pond... anyway.. he like to put coisn in these small plastic pouches. Well, there were about 5 or 6 of those, and they were all individually tapped to this sturdy plastic backer board. And then each one was also taped to each other. There had to litterally be a full roll of tape i didnt want to damage the plastic puches, and the tape was quite strong.. it took me almost an hour to get the coins out unharmed
I have had some interesting pack jobs but the most memorable is the one I got in a little pouch held by the invoice made into an origami cup!
Years ago when I did a lot of trading thru Numismatic News classifieds, taping coins to cardboard was the biggest problem. A yogurt box? That's a hoot. LOL
Can we include handling in this thread? Anyone remember the pic posted here awhile back of an eBay coin held firmly in a pair of NEEDLENOSE PLIERS?!
I ordered a 2009 SAINT GAUDENS ULTRA HIGH RELIEF DOUBLE EAGLE from the United States mint. The coin came in this huge lacquered up box that dwarfed the coin. The box made the coin look small and insignificant. The box even had a lock that took me a while to figure out how to open. Sadly, even with all this wasteful packaging the coin was still loose in the box.