Where's The Numismatic Love?

This goes against one of the Mint's marketing paradigms, which is "medals don't sell, coins do." A logical corollary of this would therefore be "If you want to sell a medal, you need to pair it with a coin". Which is great in theory, except when the coin is gold, and thus so expensive that only a tiny minority of the potential customer base can afford it.

I'm sure they would have sold a lot more coin-and-medal sets if the "coin" had been a bronze replica of a Wheat penny. Or even, I don't know, an actual silver dime, perhaps?


The reasoning here is quite simple: the Mint is giving people what it thinks they want.

For years, people have been saying to the Mint, though coin forums such as this one, sentiments such as "we hate the dead presidents, give us back the classic Liberty coin designs". This, combined with some actual comparative sales data (such as the fact that the best-selling and highest-demand coins in the gold "President's Wives" series were the coins from unmarried presidents that featured classic Liberty heads instead of the coins depicting actual women) all combine to send a clear, coherent message to the Mint's marketing gurus: "US coin collectors want the Mint to make replicas of the classic coin designs".

So that's what they're doing. And they're going to keep doing it, until another message is sent or the magic stops working and people stop buying them.

This is always the problem when anybody tries to "give people what they say they want". Sometimes, "what they say they want" is not what they actually want. And sometimes, "what they want" is impossible so they try to substitute something similar, but "almost-what-they-want" doesn't quite cut it.