COLLECTOR OUTRAGE OVER THE U.S. MINT

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V23 2020 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 23, Number 47, November 22, 2020, Article 25

Coin World reported this week on collector outrage over the U.S. Mint. -Editor

United States Mint officials seem so determined to drive away once loyal customers that one has to wonder whether their marketing decisions are deliberately aimed at shrinking the Mint's customer rolls.

Mint officials are offering nothing more than empty platitudes in response to customer complaints about several offerings on Nov. 5 and Nov. 9, offers featuring coins and a medal celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. As the small sampling of comments from readers in Coin World's Nov. 30 print edition "Guest Commentary" and "Letters to the Editor" columns show, both offerings were unmitigated disasters for many collector customers of the Mint.

Mint officials need to get out of the business of creating artificial rarities. Collectors are infuriated when they see a coin sold by the Mint for $2,600 being sold just a few days later for $13,000. They get especially angry and downright suspicious when well-heeled dealers acquire multiples of the coins and offer them to the public at vastly increased prices.

CoinWeek also addressed the issue in the form of an open letter to U.S. Mint Director David Ryder. Here's an excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor

Not a day goes by that we do not receive angry emails from both collectors and established dealers in the rare coin market about the lineup, marketing, and rollout of the Mint's numismatic products. It would truly be exhausting to answer them individually, and so we devote most of our time to creating numismatic content that is meant to excite, inform, and benefit the collector.

Therefore, it is unusual for us to form a response to one of these letters. But when, after a week of predictable sell-outs and manipulations takes place in connection with a highly anticipated Mint release and the Director of the Mint feels compelled to write his own letter, we feel that we should respond.

Just to be clear, Director Ryder, the professional numismatic community can be divided into two camps. There is the camp that would like nothing more than to see CoinWeek and other hobby publications grab a paddle and take the United States Mint and its numismatic products behind the woodshed and give it the business. And there is the other camp that looks for ways to take advantage of the U.S. Mint's customer base by building their own marketing concepts around the Mint's limited-edition product lineup and injecting themselves into the flow of these coins from the Mint to the collector.

Human nature and "Fear of Missing Out" (FOMO) play a role in all of this, of course. But from where we sit, nothing that happened with the rollout of the Mayflower collector coin and medal sets or the End of WWII privy mark program should have come as a surprise.

The profits that come from these offerings happen in the immediate aftermarket, with the repackaging of Mint products by third parties and the sale of these newly repackaged products by telemarketers and promoters. For the most part, these third parties do a better job marketing U.S. Mint material than the Mint does itself. They understand the powerful pull of FOMO and often reap huge profits by setting high prices and riding the tide down.

Now, the Mint has made an effort to reach out to the coin industry for feedback and insights in recent years, holding a number of annual numismatic forums (we assume one would have been held in 2020 were it not for the COVID pandemic). And having attended several of these forums ourselves, we are struck by two things: 1) the Mint expects its industry partners to bear the full cost of attending and giving the Mint what amounts to unpaid marketing insights, and 2) whenever industry stakeholders push them on understanding the Mint's role as a leader in the industry, Mint officials push back, saying that their hands are tied because they are a government agency and not a business.

Yet at the same time, Mint officials highlight in their annual report the fact that they have "produced over 24 million ounces of bullion and nearly 4 million units of numismatic products" and in the course of doing so have "achieved the status of being a top 100 e-commerce retailer according to Internet Retailer."

Achieving top 100 e-commerce retailer status is an extraordinary accomplishment given the niche nature of coin collecting, but it also serves as a clear reminder that the United States Mint is the largest coin dealer in the world and that it conducts its numismatic and bullion business completely aware of this fact.