Selling Coins At Post Offices?

Our main PO sells a lot of different coins and sets and you get them for the same price that the RCM sells them for BUT you don't have to pay the shipping cost. Also after a year or more they put a discounted price on the older ones.

Shoppers drug mart is usually where I see display cases of mint sets, medalions,proofs etc. They are always the dame price as the RCM website and they have more then one of each so you could look at several exemples before choosing the coin or set you want.

Sorry forgot to add that. Drug store post offices are mite common and all over the place. I dont kniw even where the non shoppers drug mart post offices are.

Bstrauss3 - I agree about the ignorance of USPS offering by postal clerks in the US. It isn't profound but rather there are always different issues being put forth and as the USPS provides money orders and accepts passport applications I think philatelic knowledge has taken a back seat. USPS did have some post offices decades ago with a philatelic desk but most or all have been discontinued and centralized to the fulfillment center/online store. I think that is a shame as it hurts USPS' sales of its products. It would be great if in large to moderate size cities they had one post office with a philatelic desk a few days a week.

Now as for selling coins - sorry but too much of a security risk and as one collector friend expressed, if it weren't for the bullion stackers, I am unsure coin collecting would be doing as well as it is doing now --- many were burned by the huge bubble in numismatic products from 1986 - 1992 and still have not recouped some of what they spent on numismatic coins (think of it this way, at the time people were spending $400 for mid-grade mint state Walking Liberty halves from after 1934 when today you could get such coins at half or a little less that amount). Commemorative coin sales have been declining for decades and for some issues the amount sold put them in the rarity range with mintages well below 5,000 but with the problem they have a very high survival rate and the US Mint premiums for these is exceptionally high (same goes for the gold First Spouses coins which may become incredibly valuable rarities if you are fortunate to have heirs willing to hold onto them for at least 40 or more years!). The only product I could see the post office selling would be the equivalent of the souvenir sets the individual mints used to sell and a few low value commemoratives such as the half dollar clads. But again you are burdening the USPS clerk with yet more work. I doubt they would want this extra task.

I think it's a matter of the USPS and the US Mint seeing each other as rivals for the attention of collectors, rather than as potentially mutually beneficial partners.

This lack of co-operation is also evident in the lack of official PNCs - "philatelic-numismatic covers". Britain, Australia, Canada and most other countries in the western world have for decades now been issuing government-authorized PNCs, where the mint makes a commemorative coin, the post office makes a commemorative stamp on the same theme, and the two items are combined into one product, the PNC - which is an officially-issued first-day-cover with a coin attached to it. The resultant PNCs are marketed and sold by both the mint and the post office with the profits shared between them. At first they were written off as gimmicky, but they've become very popular mainstream collectables, especially for the people who like to collect both coins and stamps.

In the US, all the PNCs you might find on the market are privately-made concoctions, filling the perceived need because the US Mint and USPS do not and apparently cannot co-operate to produce a joint official product.

Another factor is the increasingly privatized nature of the post office shop in this country. Once upon a time, all you could do in a post office here in Australia was postal-related things. Then you could start to do other government business at post offices - deposits and withdrawals with the government-owned bank, paying bills for government-owned utilities, getting passport photos taken, that sort of thing. Then the post offices got franchised out, and post shop owners needed to find lots of other things to sell and make profits on, since selling postage isn't profitable (they are required, by law, to not sell postage stamps at anything other than face value). These days, there is very often a huge queue in your typical shopping centre post office, but practically nobody in the queue is actually sending mail, and there's everything from coins to children's books to Christmas cards for sale on the shelves, with actual postal products relegated to a small corner of the shop. So coins are just one of the non-postal products they sell.

The US Mint might have better luck convincing a bank than USPS. IIRC certain Bicentennial mint products were sold at banks during 1976.

Remember back in the late '60s and early '70s when gas stations would give away glassware and cutlery with every fill-up? Now they could give away mint sets--clad, of course.

Goes back further than that. The practice started back around or shortly before the Great Depression. My family has a near complete four or six person setting of Green Horseshoe pattern glassware acquired through those fill up gifts back then. (one setting is plate, salad plate, cup and saucer, soup bowl, plus we have the serving trays punchbowl, ladle etc. The only thing we don't have is the covered butter dish.)