People Are Like Crows - They Like Shiney Objects

Typetone

I was at a charity auction event this weekend. One of the items was a women's purse studded with glass crystals. The item was nominally valued at $2,000. I thought it looked OK, but not too different than what one could find at Wal-Mart in the 5 year old girl's toy section.

Once the bidding got to $1,500, I turned to the doctor who was sitting next to me and expressed some surprise that this purse could be bid so high. His comment was "People are like crows, they like shiney objects".

Is that why we collect coins??

Have a good week!

Greg

cupronik

I had a similar discussion with a local dealer regarding the popularity
of the latest issue statehood quarter. He was amazed of the amount
of impatience on some people when a new issue is "supposed" to be
available due to a Coin World (or other) press release. Yet, none of
these persons has any interest of problem-free circ type from the mid-
19th century (for example)- something of solid value and not readily
available. I mentioned that people like "bright and shiny" and he re-
plied with his analogy that "people are like crows or monkeys being
attracted to shiny pieces of junk, i.e. statehood quarters. I thought
flashy fishing lures (Ford Fenders) might also fit.

cladking

There was a situation reported in the mainstream press last year about a car wash owner
who installed a camera on his coin operated units in an attempt to find who was stealing
large numbers of coins from the machines. What he found was that a couple of birds work-
ing in tandem were getting in and removing quarters up to three at a time. There was no
evidence that they were discriminating between the shiny ones and the worn coins.

These were merely birds and one couldn't expect them to merely pull out of circulation only
the shiny junk or to assemble their collections in an organized fashion. But they shouldn't be
judged too harshly since being a bird imposes some strict limitations on what one can collect.






edited for typos.