Poll: Why Do You Visit Coin Dealers?

Although I buy most of my coins from ebay sellers or via this forum - no coin dealers locally here - I emptied my pockets at the last coin show in town!

i am the same as pls and sir ferrari no coin dealers by me so I buy off ebay and these forums

Can you pretty much trust any established store front coin dealer?

Coinage- I hate to say this, but no, you can't. You should be able to, but unfortunately that is not the case. I have been in many coin shops and there are some good ones but there are also some very bad ones. If you can find one with a dealer you know you can trust based on some past experiences and good word of mouth from other collectors in your area stick with them. Of course all I have to go on is my personal experience, and obviously I haven't even been to 5% of the shops out there but as with everything, buyer beware.

I selected "I know what I want, and simply visit dealers to select from their inventory: the more the better" which fits the closest but not exactly.

My local dealer is the only coin dealer in the city of St. Louis(a few are in the surrounding county area). Unfortunately, his B&M would probably not survive as a coin shop much like all the others that have gone out of business. He has a thriving bullion business that allows him to also operate a coin shop and the best feature of the shop is the Monday night bid board.

For those not familiar with the concept of a bid board, it is a membership only auction($5/year) and you are assigned a number. About 60-75 lots per week are hung on a pegboard and you write your number with a bid on the card attached to the coin. Members can submit four lots per week with a 10% commission and the shop supplies the rest. The shop stays open later on Mondays for the bid board and the bidding ends at 7pm but the action is a bit fast and furious those last few minutes

It has been a great source of material specifically for my collection(over half my MS Franklin set came from the bid board in a two year period), the occasional oddball item that I never knew existed(neutron irradiated dime from ORNL), and really cheap stuff for resale(most of the items in my recent sales listing came from the bid board). Some of the more popular items command strong money but it is not uncommon to walk away with four or five coins under Greysheet bid.

The way I see it, I have access to 60-75 coins a week for purchase at usually a much lower than retail price. The variety is much better than you would see in a run-of-the-mill dealer's cases and in fact the variety is better than what the owner offers in his own cases The coins are available for viewing up to two weeks ahead of time so it is also ripe for cherrypicking. Cheap coins and cherrypicking is all fine and dandy, but the real enjoyable part is getting to socialize with the old-timers every Monday(one of them has a complete Large Cent collection 1793 wreath to 1857, all of them fine or better including the 1793s and 1799) and the Christmas party(which was this evening) with assorted barley sodas, deer sausage, 7 layer mexican dip, shrimp n'sauce, and various other finger food items. Simply put, it is kinda like Cheers- a place where everybody knows your name(we don't have a Norm though).

I buy from dealers I know, because I can sit down and look at stuff without having to guess at how it looks, which is the case almost all the time online.

It helps to "know" people too, as you can get better deals and access to things not available to most.

In other words, for the poll option I would have to go with the raw coins in their own grades options.

Lately I buy mostly from ebay. There is one dealer close to me. However, I have quit going to his shop because he never has anything new and doesn't seem to care. So I have quit going and have started calling him on the phone to inquire if he has gotten any Lincoln's since the last call and the answer is always no. I find ebay to be a good source as long as I'm patience. A Lot of people over bid on the coins. I also attend a monthly coin show in Atlanta.

Tom