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Valued Member
United States
60 Posts |
All-
Apologies if this has been covered before, but I've been pondering a question about my own local coin shop that a few recent threads here kinda sorta touched on.
That is (without intending to be too nosy), what percentage of your local coin shop's business is buying and selling coins versus buying and selling bullion?
I've been going to the same local shop for at least 15 years and it seemed like back then it was 70 or 80% coins to 30 or 20% bullion. Now, after the recession, the run-up on gold and silver and a highly polarized political environment, it seems like those numbers are now reversed- about 20% of the business is actually selling coins while 80% is buying and selling bullion. I've seen people come in and plunk down well over 10 grand on silver bullion while I'm poking through the junk bins on more than one occasion recently.
I'm not knocking this- if bullion is what people want and it's profitable for the the shop to supply, then all the better. The shop seems to be doing quite well financially.
The only downside for me is that as a collector (rather than an investor) I'm in the minority of the shop's customers, and as a collector of world coins I'm in the minority of the minority. Because of this, the owner has a. long ago sold off for melt most of the less-expensive world silver coins I would be interested in and b. has very little incentive (i.e. profit) in maintaining an interesting and changing inventory of other world coins in my price range.
Again, I'm not exactly complaining- business is business, and I can find more than I could ever buy online. However, I really enjoy the "event" of spending an afternoon shooting the bull down at the coin shop, even if there isn't ever much new to look at.
Any similar experiences out there?
cheers,
tbg
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Pillar of the Community
United Kingdom
856 Posts |
I don't have one. In a town of 250,000 people, in the middle of England, not a single coin shop.
In fact the nearest was over 30 miles away, until I noticed the shop (15 miles away) where I bought my first few coins and that had turned into a pawnbrokers has recently started listing a few coins on their website again. But it's still nothing compared to the illustrated catalogues they used to issue twice a year in the late 1990s.
So my personal feeling (though I've not been collecting as long as you bugguy) is that the survivors have specialised and made sure they have a web presence. The others? Retired and gone, or switched to jewellery, bullion and pawnbroking I suspect.
Of course, coin collecting is perhaps different this side of the Atlantic. Our currency is only 40 years old, so there's little picking coins from change for serious collectors. Any pre-decimal coinage you want, you need to buy. And while junk shops, antique fairs and the like often have some coins, for the better examples you need to travel (or look) further afield. Particularly once you specialise like me.
I could probably visit half a dozen places and not find a coin of the type I collect, let alone one I'd like to buy. Hence I rely on the internet pretty much all the time.
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Moderator
 Australia
16940 Posts |
For most coin shops, as far as walk-in customers go, you're probably correct in that most of them are bullion buyers/sellers. I don't know the statistics but I did have one dealer tell me a couple of years ago, before the bullion spike, that I was one of the few regular customers who came in just to buy coins. Most of his coin collector customers bought off his website.
The reason, I suspect, is that most hard-core coin collectors are specialized and are looking for specific coins, like Tom above: they're letting Google do the walking for them. Why drive all the way across town (or over to another town) on the off-chance a dealer might have something you're interested in buying, when you can find dozens of virtual dealers all over the world who definitely do have coins you want to buy? It's still worth it for me, because my collecting tastes are broad enough that I'm bound to find something worth making the trip for.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
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Bedrock of the Community
 United States
12888 Posts |
Of the 3 I frequent, 2 are almost exclusively bullion even though they have a large showroom floor with cabinets filled with (overpriced) coins. One that I go to seems to focus mostly on numismatics.
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Bedrock of the Community
United States
11951 Posts |
I am thinking that different areas may have different availabilities of coins vs bullion.
In my experience, for the last couple years I have been seeing a lot of nice coins coming into the local coin shops. I am thinking with a poor economy, some people are selling their collections, in need of money.
I have been wanting to put more bullion away, but keep finding interesting coins I want/need for my collection.
I would have to agree that there seems to be a high volume of bullion being traded .. but I think the coins are out there too.
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Posted 06/10/2013 7:32 pm
