tl;dr: Even seemingly healthy coin shows are at risk Over the past couple of years, I've seen dealers change what they sell from mostly coins to mostly bullion. Even dealers with a national reputation for selling rare coins are filling 1 1/2 cases with bullion and 1/2 with coins where it used to be 2 filled cases plus backstock. The reason you go to a local show is to spend cash without paying wire-transfer fees, credit card surcharges and shipping. So a lot of sales are made and ounces trade hands. But they aren't coin sales. You need to sell a lot of ounces paying 10x face and selling at 11x face to cover a $200 table fee, gas, hotel, and food. Strike 1 Here in North Texas, we have a lot of coin shows within oh, a 2-hour drive. There are 4 or 5 a year in Grapevine, 3-4 in White Settlement and then the Fort Worth Coin Club. Add in other places that are an hour or two drive - McKinney, Plano, Sherman, Paris, Bellmead, Tyler... TNA in Arlington. TNA and Grapevine are the biggies (200 and ~70 tables respectively). It's an embarrassment of riches. There are periods of a month or two with no shows. But generally, every week, two or three weeks there is something. Largely it's the same dealers... although not 100% overlap as there are some dealers who hate one of the three or four promoters and won't attend their shows. Most of the dealers are 'relatively' local (down into Houston, a 5-6 hour drive). And even if the show conflicts with a big national show they show up. There are so many that IMHO they are dying out. 40 table shows are now 30. And I've decided I'm not driving two hours to see the same material that was at the show two weeks ago and will be at the next show next week. This means I'm not helping the smaller shows... but I was driving 2 hours, spending an hour at the show, saying hi to a couple of dealers I know, buying a BBQ lunch and driving home. When you score a show by the local BBQ joint (Stanley's) it's time to admit you have a problem. Strike 2 Anyway, the point is that this weekend we had a lesson in how small the community really is. The Oklahoma Numismatic Association put on their (annual?) state show this weekend. The OKC state fairgrounds are a 3-hour drive (*below). But it's a 90 table club show... It's also the weekend for the Grapevine show. Friday Grapevine (I took the afternoon off) Saturday OKC. Grapevine was very light in dealer attendance. One whole corner of the room wasn't set up. Several places where there would be regular dealers were empty or had different inhabitants. Tables were not set up in the rows (one dealer had an extra table of junk he hoped to sell - glassware, pictures, that kind of stuff). Why? They were in OKC as I found out yesterday. Six or seven of the bigger dealers. They had committed to OKC before Grapevine was scheduled or had made the choice to do the longer drive for a different trading area (for the Houston dealers it was a 6-7 hour drive). It doesn't take more than that to make a typically well-attended show look like it's dying. And three strikes and you are out. (* actually took 2:40... I was traveling in a pack through 70mph speed limit Southern Oklahoma and two cars blew past me... "Gee I thought, they must be doing 90". I had pushed up the cruise to stay with the pack, so I looked down at MY speedometer and realized I was doing 92, so I revised their speed to 100 and dropped to a Texas-sedate-82) (weirdly, when we got into 75mph Texas, the traffic was doing 77).
A probable explanation - they gotta offer what they can sell just to stay in business. Think about it Burton, the coin market has been dropping steadily for over 10 years now. And that makes it downright difficult to sell the kind of coins you're used to seeing, or want to see. Or at the very least difficult to sell them at a profit because the dealer has more in them than he can sell them for. So, they switch things up just to keep the cash flow moving. They really don't have much choice.
I realize this. There are only a few dealers who have enough capital to float the kind of three table display we love. I talked to my friend - APMEX was buying everything that wasn't nailed down. It's just good business for him... he sells it above what he paid (albeit less than he might sell it for at a show - if he carts it around to 3 or 4 shows that margin is gone). Frees up working capital to buy collections and have new material at the next show. And even he shifted one of his 6 cases is pretty much all bullion- But nice stuff and not exactly the same that everybody else is selling. So he has a market. Far, far better than the guy who sets up every time and not only do I recognize most of the coins in his display I know the sequence he sets them up it. He has 3 allegedly high grade 3 cents Silvers in NNC slabs. A 1851, 51O and a 53 all in alegedly MS65. The 51O is cleaned, and I haven't bothered to look at the others... If he ever sells one all 3 of his cases will have to shift around...
Interesting thread. I had similar experiences in my own area. Three monthly shows occur with such regularity - I wish my body had such regularity - that, after a year of attendance, I knew exactly what the floor would contain before I walked in. Though the bullion to coin ratio didn't increase as drastically as it appeared to have at the TX and OK shows described, the overwhelming feel of sameness often felt stultifying. After a few years of visiting these shows, I observed more and more dealers staring into space, looking like they wondered why they kept coming or perhaps pondering the huge mistake they may have made. No one seemed to visit their tables. I sensed more and more dealer ploys to extort my money. I quickly found that staring at something for more than 30 seconds carried the risk of launching a fervent haggling or begging session, often with a dose of irritating pressure sales. "Do you want that?!?! I can take 5 off! How about it?! Do you want it now?!" A fair portion of the dealers seemed outright desperate. Soon, tables began disappearing from shows and the rooms looked slightly emptier with successive visits. At the smaller shows dealer chatter tended to become more audible and phrases such as "no one is buying," "I can't believe I waste my time" and "I'm not coming here again" floated in the air. Most of the buyers, at least the ones I observed, seemed more interested in inexpensive recent issues than the big money items. I saw far more people leaving with common modern dollars, quarters, Euros and Silver Eagles than any classic coinage. It's probably more difficult to make a profit with such smaller ticket items. Dealer personality types also became more predictable and detectable. My least favorite type, thankfully not too prevalent, were the ones that chatted you up like a best friend while you browsed but then blew you off rudely the moment they realized that you weren't going to buy something immediately. Didn't they realize that I might be planning to return and they just ruined any chance of my coming back? I never went back to such dealers unless they had something that I wanted passionately. Many of the classic coin dealers had an aloof and almost disdainful, "I know you don't have enough money for these nice coins so why should I even bother with you" look to them. Most of these dealers didn't display prices so I rarely dealt with them anyway. That actually worked out fine. Then there was the absent dealer. The dealer who, no matter how long I waited for them to show up, just didn't appear. If I waited long enough for them, I would then ask them about a particular coin and they often gaped at it like "what is this?!? I had no idea I sold these things!" and they would start talking to other dealers about what they should charge, seemingly oblivious to my increasingly impatient waiting. I wasted a lot of time at these booths. Thankfully, some helpful, friendly and genuinely good dealers also existed, but many others suffered from a horrible lack of basic customer service skills. This certainly can't help the hobby or attendance at shows, either. People coming from outside the coin market, and accustomed to much friendlier buyer/seller interactions, probably feel brutalized at these shows. Why would they ever return? I, like the original poster, also detected a problem, or problems, with the local shows in my area and I haven't attended one in well over a year. I even avoided the big annual show, which typically has good attendance, but also suffers heavily from bourse floor deja vu. After going 3 years in a row, I felt like I was attending the same show year after year, with only minor differences. More and more bullion seems to have crept into this show. It's all a little depressing and it's resulted in my complete lack of coin buying for almost 6 months now. I still enjoy talking about and studying coins, which is why I keep visiting this forum, but I can no longer imagine putting real money into them.
On the other end, big shows are a rarity in my immediate area and usually have a good dealer turnout with good offerings and a nice crowd. Unfortunately for your humble narrator, this year’s Gulf Coast Show was when I was in Florida, so I have to wait another year.
A dealer knows their business. They know what they can sell online, in a physical store or a specific shows. They will sell at each avenue of revenue what they can to stay in business.
Here in Utah, our shows are well attended. Luckily, those dealers that don't do well open it up next year for those not selling the same old thing. We only have 4 shows a year, so we don't have mission creep.
