Britania Prices

Have someone buy them here (CONUS) and ship 'em to your APO (OCONUS) and put "numismatic supplies" on the Customs form...or have your buyer hold 'em till you rotate back to the states. I, for one, would not pay double for something that you can acquire for elsewhere. But then again, you should be receiving COLA so that should provide some relief for buying on the economy.

BTW...there are two "n's" in Britannia.

That is pretty much it...money.

The Royal Mint charge ridiculous prices, the answer is that nobody who collects Britannias buys theirs from The Royal Mint in the first place! Welcome to rip-off Britain.

Chards in blackpool are selling for £27

Another thing to note with the APMEX price is that there is no VAT on silver in the US, whereas there is another 20% plonked on top for UK buyers.

Those who know no better, or fall for overpriced tat on a regular basis it seems.

If you still have family in the US, i'd get them to buy them for you and hold them for when you return - bound to be cheaper. You might actually do better hunting down US coins here too.

Nothing online really as they will be knowlegable about it - mainly car boots, antique places & fairs where I've picked up some really good coins for as little as 10 or 20p simply because they don't know the value of foreign coins.

Unfortunately the really bad weather kicks in (as opposed to just the bad weather ) until March so not much chance to go coin hunting till then.

There are two ways to buy Britannias from the Mint.

You can buy them one at a time from the Mint Shop, for £57.50 each; they come in an informative cardboard folder and plastic capsule. This is how collectors are "supposed" to buy them.

Or you can buy them in bulk, from the Mint's Bullion division. These come in hard plastic tubes, with no pretty wrappers. Minimum order for "personal" customers is 40 silver Britannias. There's no price listed, but presumably the laws of bulk discounting apply: the more you buy, the cheaper the cost. Orders of more than 250 coins apparently qualify as "wholesale". I would assume APMEX, Chard and other bullion dealers would buy an awful lot of them; it is these coins which you can buy at near-BV price.

One thing I'm not sure of, which those in the know might be able to inform us: is the quality of the bulk coins the same "brilliant uncirculated" that you get from the Shop singles? If they are the same, are the Shop-sold coins specially minted for sale to collectors, or are they specially hand-picked from the regular production run?

Either way, buying them from the Shop, you're basically paying double the price for some pretty packaging. Not all that different to what people do when buying mint sets, really - the "profit margin" for mint sets is even higher: here, you're paying £50 for £17.38 face value of coins.

I have purchased Britannia's both from The Royal Mint (several years ago) and recently from UK dealers.

I have not noticed any difference except for the ones from The Royal Mint come in a bit of cardboard.

Neither one came in airtite capsule.

By the way, there will be two Britannia's made from now on. One is a bullion offering with the new purity and then the tradional one.

Ken

Awsome. And I'm glad that when I read through someone else had the same question as to the price diff. I think that I'm going to go ahead and buy the bullion version from Provident.