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I have been following mint sales for about 19 years, and the last big sales collapse for the US Mint happened in 2008, to where at the end of the year they announced the removal of about 300 products from future sales. 2008 gave us a year of modern iconic coins like the buffalo fractionals, the last of three years of gold eagle unc fractionals and platinum eagle fractionals. The mint at the time decided to go with almost all one ounce coins going forward, and that seemed a drastic change since the 1/10 ounce coins were very popular, always selling the most of any denomination or size.

Fast forward to today, and the 2024 collector coin sales numbers show a large decline of US Mint sales compared to prior years. How bad is it? Well, I am seeing sales that have dropped from about 30% up to 60% for most coins, and while so far they have only sold a fraction of 2023 comparable sales, the coins can remain up for sale for years if the mint wants, until inventories are depleted.

I have posted about the 2024 Harriet Tubman gold unc commemorative coin coming in at record low sales. The interesting thing about the commemorative program is sales have to end at the end of the year of issue, meaning that the collapse of sales is shown in the final mintages for the 2024 commemoratives, across all sizes, including both coin types (Tubman and Greatest Generation).

If the rest of the mint portfolio had this same limitation, we would have seen coins finish at lows nobody could have ever predicted.

The 2024 one ounce gold unc eagle coin only has sales of 2750 so far. The 2024 proof gold buffalo 1 ounce is only at 8,859. In a sign of how bad sales are, the 2024 1 ounce silver unc eagle still hasn't broken 100k yet, it is only at 93,253. The 2024 one ounce proof palladium is only at 3,431.

Compared to the 2008 sales decline, 2024 is nearly half the sales of 2008, It looks to be across all sales for mid to high end products, however, the mint has been raising prices on products, so overall revenues for the mint might actually be up. It is hard to predict, since gold prices going up make things seem OK on a revenue standpoint. It might even look like they have improved in a crazy sort of way.

I don't think that any changes are on the way due to any of this, except I will make a prediction about future coin sales. Since the mint normally strikes products to anticipated demand, the 2025 collector coins may be the ones that get struck to the much lower demand we saw throughout 2024. We will not know until the end of this year if I am right. It may be the mint strikes only 3000 1 ounce unc gold eagle coins this year. Or only 9,000 1 ounce proof gold buffalo coins. Even the Morgan and Peace dollar coins have seen sales decline by a lot. They may be struck in lower numbers as well.

These lower numbers may be the new normal, only time will tell. While it is bad for past issue prices, as falling demand means less collector interest in general. It could make for some great future issues that have record lows, and will go up in value as a result. This has happened in past years, such as 2008. Maybe history repeats itself again.

@U1chicago said:

@Sanddollar said:
The above is actually a legitimate question. You may for one reason or another, valid or not, care for the author of it yet is there a chance anyone, someone could answer it without the snark?

The best guess is that Rick had it on his website as part of a consignment. It didn’t sell and was sent to Heritage but Rick forgot to take it down from his website.

That sounds like a reasonable guess. However, the coin’s included under “New Purchases”.
https://www.indiancent.com/new-purchases.html

Edited to add: Someone from Heritage plans to bring this to Rick Snow’s attention shortly.

Nothing gets me going like some double dime action!


MS64

MS64 CAC

MS63

I bought this last night at DLRC. It's a hard date to find nice. Probably over-paid a bit but I am excited to have my first CACG coin!

BTW, great service at DLRC!