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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Burton Strauss III, post: 3512814, member: 59677&quot;]tl;dr: Even seemingly healthy coin shows are at risk</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Over the past couple of years, I&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Strike 1</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>TNA and Grapevine are the biggies (200 and ~70 tables respectively).</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Largely it&#039;s the same dealers... although not 100% overlap as there are some dealers who hate one of the three or four promoters and won&#039;t attend their shows. Most of the dealers are &#039;relatively&#039; local (down into Houston, a 5-6 hour drive). And even if the show conflicts with a big national show they show up.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are so many that IMHO they are dying out. 40 table shows are now 30. And I&#039;ve decided I&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>This means I&#039;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&#039;s) it&#039;s time to admit you have a problem.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Strike 2</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, the point is that this weekend we had a lesson in how small the community really is.</p><p><br /></p><p>The Oklahoma Numismatic Association put on their (annual?) state show this weekend. The OKC state fairgrounds are a 3-hour drive (*below). But it&#039;s a 90 table club show...</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s also the weekend for the Grapevine show.</p><p><br /></p><p>Friday Grapevine (I took the afternoon off) Saturday OKC.</p><p><br /></p><p>Grapevine was very light in dealer attendance. One whole corner of the room wasn&#039;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).</p><p><br /></p><p>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).</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>It doesn&#039;t take more than that to make a typically well-attended show look like it&#039;s dying. And three strikes and you are out.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>(* actually took 2:40... I was traveling in a pack through 70mph speed limit Southern Oklahoma and two cars blew past me... &quot;Gee I thought, they must be doing 90&quot;. 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).[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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