Post An Ike (Eisenhower Dollar)

This may be a little OT but HSN2 is selling the complete 32 coin set tonight for $599.

https://www.hsn.com/products/1971-1...sid/23664759

I'm not recommending it at this price merely observing that supplies can not much longer survive the strain of selling off so many coins to the general public. For $600 you could put together a pretty nice MS-64 and PR-65 set but it would take a lot of time and effort. The set being sold here will not be hand picked from a larghe5r base. Many of the coins will be visibly poorly made and poorly handled.

They usually, naturally, show nicer specimens on air and on these you could clearly see the marking and deficiencies. Of course the easy dates weren't awful but I think most people would be inclined to seek nicer specimens. Most moderns just weren't well made and they barely made it out of the mint in one piece.

Even if their customers don't want nice specimens the fact is that there are highly limited numbers of banged up poorly made coins. After 50 years of neglect these coins have been subjected to untold degradation and loss. Most of the mint sets are gone, rolls never existed, and the survivors are spread far and wide in sock drawers and change buckets. They are not nice attractive evenly worn VF's like Morgan dollars but rather they are ugly, poorly made, and beaten up XF's. To get a nice one you have to look at three or four mint sets which get harder to find every day.

Coins like the '76 type I were hard to find back in 1976 with their tiny mintage and fewer than 10% of mint set coins being even MS-64. Nobody noticed and nobody cared. Even today not many care so every day a lot more become tarnished.

I have to believe even the attrition of HSN sets is pretty high. They get taken into coin shops and told they were ripped off but they are offered a price where the dealer can make an easy profit and many of the coins put into the cash register. This has been going on so long now and is what has killed most of the mint sets; dealers pay less than face value for the sets and put the coins in the cash register. When will it end? It's beginning to look like no one will care until the last set is sold on HSN.

The only reason MS-63 isn't hard is that there is no competition for the coins.

Gem is getting downright tough and it's probably easier and cheaper to buy slabbed coins than to find them yourself.

They're a lot of fun to look for though.

Nice Ike, jfeed!

Exactly what I did.

Indeed.

Here is a pic of my circulated Ike hoard

Nice group of Ike's, seamonkey5150!

All the way to my place.