Funny Experience With A Local Coin Dealer.

I've noticed that our local coin dealer gets sloppy from time to time. In the "common" Morgan dollar bin ($18/each) I found an 1899-P in F-12. I bought it and later sold it to a different dealer for $125. So it pays to cherrypick sometimes and to me, that's kind of fun.

Sidenote: before anyone questions why I sold it to another dealer, I had listed it on here in the buy/sell section for about that same price recently and no one wanted it, so I got what I was looking for from a different dealer.

Congratulations. Good luck finding more awesome coins.

I wouldn't be so hard on the dealer based on that experience with bulk world coins.

I tried just a few days ago to sell about 14 pounds of world coins I had purchased for $5 to $9 a pound from various internet sources and none of the several dealers I went to would give me anything at all for them. So I went away completely empty handed.

There is a foreign currency exchange place near me that offered me $1 a pound for them. They just buy in bulk and operate more like a pawn shop. As I sifted thru the coins found a 1893 Canada five cent worth maybe $25 that I had overlooked. I pocketed it and took their offer of $1 a pound. I don't expect these dealers to sift carefully through a large bulk lot of coins to see if maybe there's a valuable coin in there before making their offer.

I was in the antiques and collectibles business for a few years and with the variety of items that we sold, we did the best we could with quick research and pricing. There were items that we knew were valuable and those items were priced accordingly for the marketplace. But with all the different items that were antiques or collectible, there is no way to be an expert in every area. The same would apply to coin dealers. When you purchase (for resale) hundreds or thousands of coins (circulated, uncirculated, commemoratives, foreign, etc.), bills, tokens, ephemera, and whatever, things are going to slip by. Certain things are going to be obivous, and there are going to be things that look interesting and you research those. But, a day is only so long and you have to look after customers, answer the phone, put out stock, and move product to pay your bills. When a customer bought something from me that they got at a "steal", I wasn't upset. I knew that that customer would be back and would spend more time in the store looking for another deal. I would rather have customers in my store buying than to have tons of stock priced at catalogue prices and no one buying it.

Just my 2 cents worth

Oh! This was my 100th post

I agree

Congrats--that's what makes collecting so fun, particularly for rare world coins that "slip through the cracks" at US dealers. I have found some inexplicable rarities in dealer stock, I mean $200+ coins staring at me in all their obviousness for only $2-5 apiece. And, I once erred by telling a dealer what I found--after purchasing. Don't do this--ever, because you'll be marked for life.

My local dealer runs a coin shop for fun. Sifting through a hundred pounds or so of foreign coins isn't fun for him, so he lets a few of us local yokels do it; we buy in bulk @ $6.50 and sell them back @ $5.00 after we've picked over them. I know for a fact that my last three lots were picked over by more than one other collector, and I still found several coins worth close to ten bucks each in each lot.

Oh, and each time I go into the shop I buy supplies or several coins that go directly into my collection, giving him a larger cash flow and me coins that I want for no shipping charges or ebay hassles. It's a win-win situation for both of us, not to mention the fact that he allows local school kids to sift through his box of world coins, thus cultivating new collectors.

Well I've learned something. I had no idea a Palestine 1941 20 Mils was woth $119 in VF. (My 2006 Krause says $75, but still that's a valuable coin for a bulk coin lot). Now I'm gonna look thru my world coins again to see if I have any.

I'm sure that dealer would have reacted differently if you showed him the Krause listing on the coin. Can't imaging he would have said "we get these in here all the time and they'e not woth anything."