Do you consider bulk coin buyers collectors, hoarders, or something else?

shirohniichan

Some years ago I bought a small part of a "collector's" estate consisting of $100 face value mint bags of Canadian coins. Supposedly the man drove from New York to Canada every year from the 1950s to buy bags for his collection. When moving today I found some of what I bought (1960 5, 10, 25 and 50 cent pieces).

I consider myself a collector and usually assemble type and date sets of coins that interest me, and I found it intriguing how collectors in the 1950s to mid-1960s bought coins in rolls (or bags, as in this case). Now that we've into micrograding and taking huge, high-resolution images of finest-known individual coins, it boggles the mind to think in the past it was common to collect coins by the roll or bag (and thus not even be able to see the coins except for the ones on the ends [as in rolls] or not at all [as in bags]). Maybe these collectors would think us weird for spending huge bucks on common date coins just to get the finest known.

So were these roll and bag buyers collectors? Hoarders? Speculators?

Sapyx

I reserve the word "collector" for someone who buys individual coins and knows pretty much every coin in their collection, even if that "knowledge" is just a line in a database or a mark on a checklist. Someone buying in bulk and keeping them I would classify as either hoarder or speculator, depending on their motivation for doing so.

Hoarder: "I bought these because these were going cheap".

Speculator: "I bought these because I reckon they'll triple in value over the next ten years".

Back in the 1960s, people were hoarding rolls of coins as investments. The theory was, that it was a "can't lose" investment: worst case, the coins are only worth face value and you can take them back to the bank, but hopefully, at least some of your coins will become valuable.

The trouble is, of course, if everyone's going around hoarding something, then even "rare" (low-mintage or whatever) items won't be valuable, because everyone's got hoards of them.

SDSportsFan

I would call a person as described in the OP, a "hoarder", or perhaps, a "speculator". Now, on the other hand, say someone buys bags/rolls/whatever of coins, and then searches through them to find any coins they particularly like; and then, they sell/trade the bags/rolls/whatever of searched coins they don't particularly care for (or already have).....I would call that person a "collector".

So basically, I guess it's in what they do with the bags/rolls/whatever, that determines what they are, IMHO anyway.

Steve

TheRaven

My understanding this was just common practice for the day.

They probably considered themselves coin collectors. Definitions change over time.

If they considered themselves a collector, why disagree.