How many incredable rareities exist...

pontiacinf

Has anyone on the board every ponderd how many errors or extremely clean or just crazy examples of coins that exist in a closed item...i-e a bag, or a set such as in Buff c&c sets..I have 100+ mell and 76 sealed buff sets along with various linc 50$ bags from the 50's and 60's..qtr bags, 1000 face and the dog later 25$ bags...one would have to open these items...but seriously...does one think good stuff hides in here?

Shamika

"does one think good stuff hides in here?"

Nope!

cladking

Items which are truly sealed which is defined as being impossible to know what
is contained, will tend to have a higher percentage of gems and other rarities than
those which have been searched. When collectors search a bag or set, they tend to
remove the more valuable items and these will soon wind up in collections.

Remember though that many items which appear at first blush to be unsearched are
in actuality picked over. Mint sealed bags can be spot checked by looking between
the stitches as the coins are manipulated through the bag. Rare varieties are often
known to issued at a specific day or month. Since the bags are dated it is a simple
matter of selecting only those bags for search leaving behind bags with no possibility
of containing that gem or variety. These same considerations apply to sealed mint
sets since they were packaged consecutively and mailed out by zip code.

It's probably safe to predict that if one hundred of a coin exists and 10% of the origi-
nal packaging for that coin remains unopened then there will be another 10 or 12
coins submitted when they are opened.

Many of the '65 to date coins have become very scarce in unopened condition. Bags
of dimes and quarters tend to be virtually non-existent and many dates of mint sets
are rarely encountered any more that haven't been opened. It's been years since I've
seen an unopened SMS package and even the opened shipping boxes aren't seen
much any more.

dbldie55

I see mint and proof sets in the boxes from the mint all the time at my local dealer. They even get GSA's from customers who ordered them when they were distributed. Don't image the people were going through all of these sets and holding them for up to 30 years, but I suppose it is possible.