Quote:
The RAM's extremely highly paid bureaucrats, who's university thesis must have been " how can I become even better at being completely stupid ? ", would have each got honors, with distiction.
You have got them all wrong. Their thesis would have been entitled "How does a Mint maximize profits above all other considerations". The thesis has four key dot points:
- Everyone who buys our products has OCD, or some other compulsion that forces them to buy everything we sell.
- They will not stop buying them, no matter how many different themes we make or how bizarre or irrelevant the product's theme is.
- If someone only wants only one coin in a set, they will nevertheless buy the entire set just to get that one coin, no matter how expensive we make the set or how many extraneous additional objects we put into the set.
- Profit maximization is therefore attained by maximizing the number of different products sold and by maximizing the number of different coins that go into each product.
The mint's dogmatic assumption about Point 1, which simply isn't true, has seen a lot of collectors give up on trying to "keep the set complete". It has also seen many of their products lose their entire purpose.
The Baby Sets are an excellent case in point. The original concept was brilliant: to make a cheap, affordable numismatic gift that anyone in the country could buy as a gift for a newborn - a family heirloom that might spawn coin collecting in generations to come. But by including coins that are only obtainable by buying those Baby Sets, the vast majority of the sets are ending up in the hands of people who aren't the original target market.
The mint doesn't care.
Somebody is buying the baby sets, it is irrelevant to the marketeers that they aren't actually people with babies. So long as profits are maximized, all other considerations are irrelevant.
So here's my thesis in response. I call it "How does a Mint increase it's relevance to coin collectors". It also has four key dot points:
- Collectors are the reason why the Mint has a non-circulation production arm at all.
- That arm should make what the collectors actually want.
- Coin collectors are interested in "coins". An important component of the definition of "coins" is that they were actually issued for use as money.
- Relevance maximization is therefore attained by more closely tying their collector-oriented products to the actual reason for the Mint's existence: the production of circulating coinage.
Some corollaries to my thesis:
"Mint sets" should be sets of coins that
were (past tense) actually struck for circulation that year. Ideally, they should contain coins actually pulled from the regular production run, hand-picked to be problem-free, rather than be coins specially made just for putting into the sets. It would mean, of course, that mint sets would be unavailable until the
end of the calendar year, rather than before the beginning of the year. If the mint makes 50 circulating commomoratives in a year, then all fifty should be in that year's mint set, but there should be no NCLT in the mint sets at all; if the Mint doesn't make any 10 cent coins this year, then this year's mint set shouldn't have a 10 cent coin.
"Proof sets" can be made at any time, but should not be sold prior to the year stated on the coin. The designs should be proof versions of the coins planned for circulation release that year. Obviously, it won't include proof versions of "unplanned" circulating commemorative coins issued for unexpected events (eg. royal wedding/coronation/birth, saint beatification, football team winning the Grand Final, etc). Proof versions of the circulating commemoratives should be sold individually, as the circulation coins are released.
The Mint should be free to issue as many NCLT-only coins as it thinks it can sell, charge whatever they like for them and market them to either collectors or non-collectors, but they should make such coins using denominations and sizes not used for circulating coinage. This way, the "gotta catch 'em all" denomination-collectors will not feel obliged to buy them just to keep their set complete.
Yes, doing these things would likely decrease profits, short term. But it keeps the collectors interested, and on your side - and that's good for business, long term.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Posted 01/24/2015 02:12 am
