Where Do Dealers Get Their Coins?

Depends, they can get them from other dealers, bulk ordering from the mint, estates, lots of people bring coins into dealers to sell which I would guess is where most local shops get their coins. Some may come from their own collections as well that theyve upgraded or decided the time to sell is right. If you can think of it theres probably a dealer somewhere thats done it

I would imagine a large part of a dealers inventory come from people that are getting out of the hobby,selling a deceased family members collection or simply people that have fell on hard times and need to liquidate some of their assets to pay the bills.

Without dealers these people would have a very difficult time getting a fair price for their coins.

Most of the dealers in Aus also sell mint products and coin supplies to supplement their income.

I would imagine it is pretty tough to make living as a coin dealer.
I take my hat off to the B&M dealers, Without them we would have a pretty tough time getting what we want when we want it.

there are plenty of coins that get sold for far less than market value to dealers that are well known. Some family members are just wanting a quick sale and a one stop shop and when you do this the seller takes a loss by taking it to a dealer that has the cash flow to afford to buy such large collections. They either don't know enough about what they have or just don't want to take the extra time it would take to list them and sale themselves. Dealers that are known "Honest" will get allot more people walking in off the street with whole collections and the people bringing them in knows they need to make money also so they are willing to take a percentage of what the whole collection is worth for ease of selling it to one person. A dealer that gets these collections in may have specific types of coins that do not move well in his shop so he will contact other coin shops that do have customers for that specific type of coins and sell them to them at their cost or maybe a small amount more which still leaves meat o9n the bone for the other shop as well. So dealers do get coins from other dealers also

dealers make a good portion of their profit from their melt buckets as well.

they are also making more than 25%. margins might be tighter dealer to dealer but if a walk-in customer is "cashing out" I wouldn't be surprized if they aren't doubling their investment (or more).

I agree with what has been posted .. and would add.
I am sure each dealer will get their inventory from different sources. But getting them from customers
walking into the shop, is the main source. The good dealers will have a network of other dealers to buy and sell with.

There are also coin shows, many dealers with use coin shows to buy and sell inventory.

I have been helping out at local coin shops for almost two years now, buying and selling collections. And it is amazing what can walk in the door. For example last year a lady walks in and asks if we buy gold coins .. of course we do. She goes to the car and brings in a box with over 300K in gold coins. Another example, couple weeks ago, a guy comes in to sell two 1oz gold eagles(modern). He liked the price we gave him, so he asked me if I would look at some coins his grand father had left him. He with to his truck and brings back a old Dansco album that had "cents" on the cover. I open the book and it has 7 or 8 2X2 vinyl pages, all filled with $20 gold coins. When we told him we would buy the whole book, he said he had four more books and that he had silver coins too, but the boxes were to heavy to carry.

Not all collections walking into coin shops are like that .. most are not .. I helped buy around 10K in coins yesterday and today. Most of the time the volume is so large that we try hard to find all the better coins, so we can pay a fair price for them .. but it make take weeks to sort through a big collection .. sometimes it gets sold to other dealers before it is really searched. Of course not all dealers are high volume dealers. The dealers in the network I help out at buy and sell many millions in coins each year.

From my experience, of going to coin shops for over 35 years. I feel the poor economy we are in now is causing a lot of people to sell collection that have been in their family for generations.

For helping out at the shops, I get to purchase coins for my collection at very good prices .. I do know my collection has grown very much over the past two years .. and it has been very interesting seeing the other side of the counter. Between working at the coin shops and being on CCF .. I continue to learn more about coins everyday.

If you want to make a living in coins .. you need as much knowledge and you can ... and then some more.

Oh, and I am starting to add some 2012 Silver Eagle Bullion coins to my collection to every now and then. In the event I need to sell off a part of my collection in the near future, I can sell those off instead of having to dip into my older collectible coins. I call it "insurance"

That might be the greatest idea ever for collecting and making money

The poor economy has pushed many people into coin shops to sell coins which have been "buried" for years. I watched a cockroach crawl out of a dilapidated cardboard box on my dealer's counter; the guy selling his collection, who looked as if he couldn't afford a bar of soap, was trying to sell off very common coins in torn Whitman folders, thinking he had treasure on his hands. The family silverware collection of cheap plated stuff often shows up. But as several have stated, many long-term collections which have been inherited show up, too.