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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;cladking, post: 3787071, member: 68&quot;]I know a few dealers who just indiscriminately cut up mint sets for the till.&nbsp; When I ask them about Gems and varieties they say they don&#039;t care because they bought the sets back of face anyway and they are too expensive to ship.&nbsp; They say a lot of their customers notice getting these and other unusual coins in change. </p><p><br /></p><p>Where coins are really destroyed is when the sets are actually shipped.&nbsp; Dealers accumulate sets that are too expensive to cut up and then they ship them off hundreds at a time.&nbsp; Generally buyers are destroying these sets to make BU rolls and sets but there is no market for some of the coins and even the better coins must be choice and tarnish free to sell as &quot;BU&quot;.&nbsp; This means hundreds of thousands of coins every year are just cut out and taken to the bank.&nbsp; Coins like common dimes and quarters aren&#039;t worth the effort of&nbsp; choicing and rolling.&nbsp; Most 1976 tI Ikes can&#039;t even be sold as BU.&nbsp; Only about the top 30% make the cut now days and some of these must be soaked and cleaned first.&nbsp; Of course these big guys are searching Gems and varieties before they ship them off to their customers.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I always thought that we&#039;d run out of mint sets long before now but they made millions of them and there are only a few thousand collectors so&nbsp; prices are only inching up.&nbsp; That Ike from the &#039;75 mint set now wholesales for $80 a roll in BU.&nbsp; Buying one is a little more difficult because most companies will charge less than wholesale and ship culls.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>These are all &quot;funny&quot; markets because there is almost no demand and almost no supply so the huge mintages still rule.&nbsp;&nbsp; Buyers tend to be unsophisticated so it&#039;s common for very poor quality and culls to be shipped.&nbsp; Most &quot;BU&quot; &#039;82 and &#039;83 coins aren&#039;t even uncirculated at all;&nbsp; they are sliders (AU&#039;s).&nbsp; If you buy a &quot;BU Set&quot; of clad quarters it&#039;s probably going to have circulated &#039;82&#039;s and &#039;83&#039;s.&nbsp;&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Of course lots of the BU rolls of zinc and even copper memorial pennies are spotted and corroded.&nbsp; The cents in mint sets are bad in many sets with the &#039;68-P being the worst.&nbsp;&nbsp; This means even BU can require effort but most people think Gems were made and saved in huge numbers so they have no value.&nbsp; They think it&#039;s foolish to seek moderns in higher grades.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>But let just a few hundred people try to put together something like a nice choice Ike set (MS-63/4) and prices for some of these would go crazy.&nbsp; If all 20,000 cent collectors were to decide to upgrade their coins to MS-64 and replace spotted and ugly coins dates like the &#039;84 and &#039;68 would explode.&nbsp;&nbsp; Finding some dates with nice attractive surfaces/ reasonably well made/ and not scratched up is a real test of character.&nbsp;&nbsp; The services only grades these coins when people send them in accidentally while trying for higher grades.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>These markets are very thin and sophisticated at the high end but they are even thinner and very unsophisticated a few levels down from the top.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Yes, I&#039;m selling these now and I get good money for top end but not so good for other coins I know are pretty scarce.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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