This is the first time they have gone commemorative with the 10p - they have been doing it with the larger coins (50p, and £2) for ages. Mixed reception I think in the UK - serious collectors are getting fed up with the huge volume of special issues being created, but the young new collectors, who got hooked on the Olympic 50ps, will doubtless love them!
Folks on Facebook are reporting that The Royal Mint web site has crashed after putting folks into a queue. An initial mintage figure of 100,000 per letter is being spoke about as well, so that is where the 2.6 million number comes from.
Coins from The Royal Mint will put you back £52 for £2.60 worth of coins.
Australia has been making "letter coins" for a few years now, but only selling them at a massive premium over face - with the aim of "making your child's name with coins", rather than "collect the whole alphabet". If they're actually releasing these into circulation, then it seems The Royal Mint's done a bang-up job of one-upping us this time.
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
Was hoping for a Police call box, but instead, it's a postbox.
(If they can get 007 James Bond onto a coin, why not the Doctor?)
Of course, the letter F makes me want to run out and grab a chips and sauce basket from Sherlocks (our local British pub) with a pint or three for thirst.
I'm not sure I'd spend the US $70+ (not including shipping) to buy these, but it would be neat to try to collect them from circulation, unless they are intended to be NCLT.
Approx 10 hours ago I managed to order a set from The Royal Mint website, after a very long wait to access their site. Cost was £52 post free. Some of the letters were already listed as temporarily out of stock.
I checked ebay first. The ebay vultures are currently charging around £90 to £120 for a full set on buy it now. Cheapest I found was £85. I wonder how many of the 14,000 people queuing ahead of me on the RM site were genuine collectors, and how many were profiteers!
This is a way of creating a frenzy. People want to strike it rich. If each coin has lower mintage than the Kew Gardens people will go crazy. They're going crazy trying to buy them from the mint. Exactly what they want.
Some of the designs are awful, like the Z coin, it looks like some kind of sunrise, it's supposed to be a zebra crossing, as far as I can tell.
Ice cream is British? I think they've just gone off on one trying to get some nationalistic sentiment about summer time, or whatever.
I was in my local 'post office' yesterday (a few counters at the back of W H Smiths) and when I bought my stamps I asked the cashier if they had any of the new 10p coins. She said no, but told me that the nearest Crown Post Office - about 10 miles away - had some. I drove there this morning and was told they didn't, and that the reports online that the coins were being distributed through Post Office branches were completely incorrect!
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