Intact older mint sets

OldReading

It occurred to me recently while helping my son complete some of his albums, that the cheapest and easiest way to obtain nice examples of certain coins was to simply purchase mints sets and rip them apart. Many mint sets can be had for just a few dollars, coins go in the book, plastic cellophane goes in the trash. Then I wondered how many countless other mint sets have been destroyed the same way?

It got me wondering because in collecting beer memorabilia, for example, you can buy a 40 year old can for $0.25 but you’ll pay $30.00 if you want the scrap of cardboard the can originally came in.

What percentage of mint sets have been ripped apart and destroyed? Will there ever come a time when the cellophane packaging is worth more than the coins inside because so many have been ripped apart?

Just curious……..

cladking

This is an interesting comparison. The clad coins have suffered horrible attrition like
the beer cans but not nearly so great as the beer packaging. Remember too, that the
mint sets were made for collectors and are money so people haven't just tossed them
in the garbage. They've recieved little attention which is good for them since everytime
one changes hands there is a high probability it will be destroyed.

This thread has some opinions about mint set survival.

OldReading

Thanks for the linky. Interesting thread and CoinWorld article.

cladking

There is a growing number of people who collect these sets intact. To date growth of this number is
far smaller than the number of mint sets that come on the market. I would guess that The lion's share
of sets enterring the market are destroyed to make date/ denomination sets and that speculators and
intact set collectors divide the rest about equally. We'll just have to wait and see if collectors will push
the prices up for intact sets but it seems unlikely they can gain significant premiums. Certainly choice
and gem sets can gain large premiums and there is already a small market in these but large premiums
for typical sets seem more problematical. Historically there just hasn't been the kind of demand required
to propel packaging to very high levels. The new generation of collectors is more accustomed to buying
collector coins in a wider array from the mint, so they may desire circulation coins the same way.

Just in the last couple years some of the earlier mint sets have gained a fairly decent premium to BU roll
value. The coins in a typical 1972 mint set wholesale at only about 80% of the mint set bid now. Even
after factoring the odds of gems this seems to be a real premium. This set is one of those with extremely
high attrition and is one of the highest quality sets of the era.

While counterfeit sets don't exist at this time for the '68 to date sets, it might not be overly difficult to
counterfeit these. This may not be as big a problem as it appears on the surface since finding coins of
the quality required to pass as mint set coins will make counterfeiting quite difficult unless the set pre-
mium is large.

TheRaven

Earlier this year I was able to pick up a 1958 mint set, never seen one of those old style sets, and I would think nice original sets of these and older would be a toughy and probably a nice group of sets to put together.....

I think it will be a long time before modern mint sets (68-current) really are worth a substantial premium in the original packaging.....

Original packaging is how I prefer things and I feel that a run of mint sets and proof sets from the 60's to 1998 isn't the most difficult thing to do..... Now quality in mint sets is another story to be sure.....