I Was At The Coin Shop The Other Day And....

You mean an eagle once cost less than 20 bucks? Those things have terribly high premiums.

I agree with the second part, not so much with the first. Many coin shops don't want to deal with the day to day price of silver. They are tired of having to explain to buyers, why the coin they bought two days ago for $20 now costs $22. So ...... all ASE's are $29. If silver is $16, $20,$25, all Eagles are $29. Many smaller coin shops do it this way.

When the gov't sells ASEs they charge the AP's $2 over spot, so if silver is $16.50, the AP's are paying $18.50. The AP's then sell to secondary dealers, like Provident, JM, for another profit $2?. So now the eagle sits at $20.50. Unless your local shop has an in with an AP, he is buying from a secondary dealer or even a third high volume dealer.

The LCS now adds what he needs to charge to cover his overhead, thus a perfectly reasonable $25 ASE. If you are getting Eagles for less than $20, most likely it is because the LCS bought them from a customer at spot and can now make a profit without "middleman" costs.

When I started to get into coin collecting my parents remembered that they had stashed some big coin somewhere that they had received as an incentive gift to go try test out a car. Low an behold a 2004 silver eagle in a velvet mint box and everything. I was.....pretty stoked.

APMEX has silver eagles at $20.26 if paying by cc or paypal, $19.48 if you send them a personal check with free shipping on orders over $99.00. Most of the other online bulk silver and gold retailers are about the same price some with free shipping some have a shipping charge. Silver eagles on ebay have even higher premiums so the seller can cover his ebay fees. It seems to be getting harder to find anyone who has them for $2.00 - $3.00 over spot anymore.

I assume the LCS counter person didn't put a gun to the buyer's head.

I've seen some sitting in pawn shops at $49.99! They probably were priced when silver was over $40, and have been sitting there ever since.

I have a 1986 and I paid about that much for it, back when silver was higher. The $49 ones I see in pawn shops are more common dates. They're usually the painted ones from some TV shopping channel.