When Coins Arrive At A TPG -- Inside The Heads Of TPG Screeners/Graders

with Pertinax ; I see many slabbed coins on this forum where I don't agree with the grades that were given . I have sold many raw coins a couple of years ago . I do my own grading by experience of 59 years in the hobby . I never had any complaints from the buyers .
The only good thing about TPG ( In my opinion ) is they guarantee the coin to be genuine . Which is good for high rollers of rare coins .

They don't have terribly much time for thinking.

The math is easy to verify. Given that we know the number of graders employed by the company, the number of coins submitted, and the likely average length of a working day, we can calculate how much time is dedicated to looking at each coin. The answer: less than 30 seconds. This is of course an average; bulk lots of coins probably get less time, while the rare and top-tier-service coins get more.

What?

That doesn't seem much time for the average fee of $25.

That's $3,000 per hour, considerably more than my highly qualified and experienced attorney friends earn.

I own a shop with a former ANACS and NGC grader. Through him I know three other graders/former graders.

One of them told me "I started by glancing at the obverse and reverse...10 to 15 seconds...and going with my initial/gut reaction. Later I thought it unfair and started to second guess myself. I then learned that I could be off, by ten points, from my team mates. I went back to my initial method and immediately brought my grades back in line with the other team members".

Over the years this small group that I am aquainted with have all said something similiar.

No, obviously they do not grade 3000 coins an hour!

On the one hand they have to pull it out of it's recepticle, look at it, record the grade, put it back and send it down the line. With practice about one a minute; 60 an hour. Which sounds very reasonable. Some of course may take a closer look, particularly if the are asking to certify a variety. Though I have heard stories about that.

While we all wish they would get out the loop and look at our coins for a minute or two; the truth is that they are a production facility that makes more money by getting their "Product" through the process as fast as they can.

I hear the burn out rate is pretty high. I also hear that they sign nda's; which is why I never mention my partners name.

If they are spending 10-15 seconds on the coin then that initial "gut" reaction might be right most of the time, but if I'm paying what takes me an hour to earn ($25) I do expect better than "most" of the time. I spend hours (days even) working out what coins I'm sending and if the submission (like my last one) includes 50+ examples of the same date and denomination I know which ones are better than the other (careful study of 2 coins side by side). So when the coin that is inferior to the better example gets a higher grade then that "most" of the time result has failed. Especially galling when at the "top of the pops" level the value difference can be 10X to 20X for a single grade point.

nealefendi, I once had, in my shop, a display of six 1884P Morgans all graded by NGC. All were MS 64. We used them as a teaching aid.

We would tape over the grades and then have the customers arrange them by quality finally having them grade the coins. On a very consistant basis the coins were graded from 63 to 65 by our customers. Many of whom are Morgan afficianodos. One coin was always graded MS 63 and another always graded as a 65. Of the four remaining coins; one was more often than not graded as a 63 and another as a 64+/65. The visual differences between them were very obvious. Yet, in the end, they all had received the same grade from NGC: MS 64.

We had those coins on display at a regional show we were attending. We had a gentleman come over and play our game. He was actually quite shocked at the grades...oh and these had sequential serial numbers. Soon he came back with another gentleman who "played the game" with the same results. Both had graded the coins that consistantly received 63 and 65 grades as 63 and 65. It turned out that one of them was rather high up in the NGC organization and paid a considerable premium to purchase our display. Mostly because we did not want to sell.

NGC is the largest company in terms of graders. They have about 30 graders. What happens, do you think, when they have 5000 "first strike" ASEs come in, as well as another couple thousand in "bulk submissions" from commerical accounts, and a couple of thousand more in regular folk? What happens when they have 6000 submissions for 30 graders....and that is "just Monday"?

They grade over 2 MILLION coins a year. Divided by 30 graders, that means each grader averages 670,000 coins a year. Or; about 13,000 a week or; 1900 a day. Finally that averages ~ 250 an hour. That number is probably low. It does not include turnover, holidays, vacations, training days, meetings and breaks during the day.....you get the picture.

The truth is, they literally do not have the time to do more than look at your coin for a few seconds and then pass it to the other grader for their grade. And...like anything your coin will get more attention at 8am Monday than 4:45 Friday.

Hi jmkendall, (rhetorical question) why on earth would those NGC bigwigs want to pay a premium for your teaching aid collection? Unless they wanted to take it back to the graders as a teaching aid to admonish them to do better in future then the only other reason is to avoid the public seeing your display. From experience I know that PCGS is even worse in their tactics to hide their failures.
Your maths is off, with 2 million coins and 30 graders that is 67,000 per grader, not 670,000; still a hefty number as that really means 200,000 grades per grader if 3 graders grade each coin. So is it better to get a coin graded when they are super busy or super tired in the hope that they give a higher grade than the coin deserves? Perhaps someone who plays the crackout game might have some experience of this?