What Are Your Thoughts On The Melting Of Silver Coins?

Just makes me sick to think about it!

I buy silver of all kinds for resale. Almost all of the coins I pick up are common date but lots of the silverware & other sterling items are pretty darn nice. Whenever possible I sell to collectors and/or dealers. Unfortunately, the vast majority of what I buy is sent to the smelter because collectors are unwilling to pay what my refiner pays. Items sold on ebay get close to what the refiner pays but the fees reduce it to well below that.

The bottom line is I'd much rather sell to someone that would appreciate the items for what they are. Unfortunately it doesn't make sense from a financial point of view.

I don't think coins should be melted.

I don't agree that a certain coin date should be melted to help it.

You might not want 2000 1964 Kennedy half dollars but others might want a few.

For example, I only have one each all of the silver Kennedy half dollars.

I would need an additional 1964 Kennedy half if I wanted to build a modern type set.

Because the collector community usually won't pay on common silver what the melter will especially once sales fees charged by auctions are figured in. It's pure economics.

Most people can't afford to just take losses to appease those who don't agree. I have a couple hundred ounces here of .925 coins. Make me an offer (hypothetically) that matches what I'll get melting them and I'll reconsider. Otherwise they're going to become stamped bars that I can sit on or liquidate at the drop of a hat.

So to answer the question syslav - I have and they don't want them.

I'm glad that this is turning into a really interesting discussion.

One other thing that I have always wondered is if the employees of the refinery where the coins are melted actually go through some of the coins beforehand and pluck out nice foreign coins that were sent to them.

I'm sure many valuable coins are lost because of melting. While occasionally a unique or valuble piece is surely made into a silver bar, the costs of having experts identify the one gem out of 10's of thousands of junk pieces far outweighs anything you'd make. No one is going to work for free and if cataloging and sorting coins doesn't pay, they're not going to do it. The market drives the value of all items including labour. Coins aren't suddenly exempt from the reality of economics simply because they are coins.

Here's a live true real example that just happened.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...TRK:MEDWX:IT

This item sold for 39.00 US dollars just now. It contains common junk silver Canadian quarters. The seller will pay listing/picture fees and a final value fee of 12% plus Paypal collection fees. Let's say he clears and holds 34 dollars for his troubles at the end of the day.

That's five dollars face value of Canadian .80 silver common coins for a realized in pocket value of approx 34.00 bucks US. A well known retailer has a standing offer on those coins for melt of $9.76 US per one dollar face value as of this moment. That's 5x $9.76 or $48.80. Let's say it costs 3 dollars to mail them in and he'd have realized $45.80.

He only gave away 11.00 dollars. He'd have been further ahead burning a ten dollar bill on the BBQ and sending the coins in to melt.

Wanting to make a reasonable profit is not greed, it's merely the reality of having bills and taxes to pay.

svslav- I know just what you mean. I have pulled wonderful BU coins from junk silver boxes, the contents of which are slated for the melting pot. In fact, I just pulled 3 1935 & 2 1936 Canadian silver dollars from a box of this kind (in fact this incident inspired me to start this thread). It was awesome to get them at melt value, but still it bothers me what would have happened to them had I not found them before they were shipped off. Here are links to a couple of threads about the aforementioned coins:

https://goccf.com/t/65800

https://goccf.com/t/65753

svslav- Thanks! It is so true that Asian coins and coins from "unpopular" countries often just end up being viewed as junk silver. It is just crazy that a coin can become worthless to someone due to the language being unintelligible to them. But this has allowed me to pull some very nice Japanese coins out of junk and junk silver boxes.