Graded Coins At Less Than Grading Costs?

There can be several reasons but the four basic ones are

1. Dealer did a large bulk submission and got a much lower cost on the per piece slabbing fee. I believe in some cases it can be as low as $6 apiece, maybe even less.

2. Coin was submitted thinking it would grade higher than it did. If it had graded higher he would hav made a fat profit but at the lower grade it is now worth less than the slabbing fee. He can't just sit on inventory and have his money tied up, and he can't sell the coin for more than market price to try and recover his full costs because it will never sell. So he sells it at market takes the loss, keeps his capital turning and hopes he makes enough on the coins that he did well on to make up for it.

3. Smaller submitters sometimes find themselves needing to throw one more coin into a submission in order to make the minimum number for submission. In that case if they don't have a suitable coin on hand that is worth submitting they will toss in one that isn't just so they can get the submission on its way.

4. Sometimes a coin not worth slabbing will be slabbed for sentimental or personal reasons, or sometimes as an attempt to build a grading set. Sometimes very low grade coins will be submitted because there are people who try to build ver low end slabbed sets.

^--- poor guy couldnt find an 1897 lower than VF haha