Preventing future collectors from owning this!??

You could break apart a single set every minute of every day and it would still take you 232 years to get to the last set.
Collectors are doing fine.

@RedRocket said:
You could break apart a single set every minute of every day and it would still take you 232 years to get to the last set.
Collectors are doing fine.

There aren't so many of these left as you might think.

There are also nearly one a minute that are going bad. And many suffering fires and floods.

This has been going on for more than half a century.

The hell of it is no matter what is destroying all these sets most of the coins don't survive.

@MasonG said:

@cladking said:

There are also nearly one a minute that are going bad.

You don't know that to be true. Nobody does (or can).

Do you think making up stats like this is a benefit to the hobby?

Probably equivalent to continually dropping random AI slop here for no reason whatsoever.

@MasonG said:
If they're yours, you're free to do with them as you wish.

Buy why crack them out until someone else is wanting them? Seems like more Wear and Tear lowering the grade.

@oldglorycoins said:
Breaking up proof/mint sets & products. Every month we break up thousands of proof, mint sets. What are you opinions?

P.S. Please pm if you have extra sets.

Picture is Missing the wooden treasure chest...just saying

@FlyingAl said:
What’s the primary purpose of breaking the sets apart? Easier to sell?

Proof set sales used to be in the millions. Now they’re in the hundreds of thousands. Obviously, there are no longer enough proof set collectors to absorb the supply of the older sets. Anyway, I would presume that most of the coins broken out of sets will find their way into albums, into the melting pot, or into circulation.

I’ve seen dealers crack up the modern silver sets for bullion and sell that coins as scrap silver.

As for the other sets, the parts can be worth more than the whole. Collectors buy them to fill albums. They pay more for the individual coins than they would for the complete sets. This has been true since I was in high school in the ‘60s.

@oldabeintx said:
Not sure what is being asked here. One assumes there is a purpose. I guess if there isn’t a purpose, I would leave the sets intact. ????

Seems like more of an I need attention, look at me type of thread that is intended to drive people to his website vs any real question.

Why are the sets being broken up? If you’re getting 69s and 70s and slabbing them, I can understand that. But also just for laughs and giggles, there’s a real danger that we are losing a critical part of our history. Also underscores why I think the US Mint should stop producing proof and mint sets and focus on bullion releases like Morgan and Peace dollars and other stuff like it.

@MasonG said:

@cladking said:

There are also nearly one a minute that are going bad.

You don't know that to be true. Nobody does (or can).

Do you think making up stats like this is a benefit to the hobby?

It's simple math.

Assuming @RedRocket 's numbers were correct there are far more than 1% of these going bad annually. This means more are being destroyed just by corrosion than would be destroyed in more than 2.32 years. More are being cut up intentionally as well. Indeed more are being destroyed in fires and floods as well.

Then there is the simple fact that most of these sets have already been destroyed.

How in the world can you cut sets in 232 years that no longer exist?

Some dates you can cut up at almost one per minute but most dates like those 1978's take a lot longer because they don't open smoothly and they have more coins.

Don't make me get out my Copilot.

@IkesT said:

There are also nearly one a minute that are going bad. And many suffering fires and floods.

And that's just in cladking's basement...

It costs too much to air condition the barn.

@MasonG said:
More made-up numbers. Day ending in "Y".

Made up is not the same as estimated.

What are your estimates? Do you believe that there are just as many 1978 proof sets now as there were before the above picture was taken?

Do you have any data to suggest it could be possible to cut one set per minute for 232 years? Do you believe it is legitimate to compute how many gallons of gasoline it will take your car to drive to Honolulu from Los Angeles but it's ridiculous to ask where you can get gas?

@cladking said:

@olympicsos said:
Why are the sets being broken up? If you’re getting 69s and 70s and slabbing them, I can understand that. But also just for laughs and giggles, there’s a real danger that we are losing a critical part of our history. Also underscores why I think the US Mint should stop producing proof and mint sets and focus on bullion releases like Morgan and Peace dollars and other stuff like it.

Coins need to be stabilized in acetone to prevent them going bad.
Some coins are worth more face value or for their silver than in rolls or part of a set
Some sets are already damaged and can't be resold in that condition.
Some sets contain Gems and/ or varieties.
Some sets have bad packaging.
Collectors need a single coin or two out of a set and it's the easiest/ cheapest way to get them.
There are more sets than the markets can absorb so naturally they get destroyed.
A potential seller doesn't like the offers for his sets.
Dealers need sets to assemble rolls.
Dealers need sets to assemble denomination date sets.
People want to get a better look at their coins.
Collectors want to add coins to albums and folders.

Some sets are just asking for it.
...
The list just goes on and on

Point taken. But also the attrition will be alarming. Eventually the OGP will be collectible in its own right much like the 1936-1942 OGP

@oldglorycoins said:
Breaking up proof/mint sets & products. Every month we break up thousands of proof, mint sets. What are you opinions?

I think people are missing the point of your post. Some are taking it to mean that you are attempting to prevent future collectors from owning and collecting moderns and some think it's that you want to destroy all the sets for your own narrow purposes. There's actually quite a range of what people are seeing here.

I'm assuming you have some motivation to cut these sets and you would like to get more than you have, probably to sell to collectors and dealers but also to protect the coins from the ravages of the packaging material. Like many people who do this you are concerned that in the future raw sets will be a thing of the past because they are so easily obtained and so many are being destroyed.

Most collectors (especially modern bashers) just don't understand there was a time that you could pick these up hundreds or even thousands at a time. They were sometimes quite costly and the dollar was worth more in those days but if you had the money you could lay in a year's work with a few calls and numerous incoming shipments with just a few phone calls. Wholesalers used to have mountains of these things. Dealers would periodically ship them everything they had in stock except for one or two of each date they kept as a curtesy to clients and collectors.

Now they're gone. All those mint buyers are gone and the sets were sold to the local shop. Collectors are few and far between and buying sets, while generally cheaper now days" is far more work because most of the time you find them a handful at a time. A few of these and a couple of those.

It would not really be inaccurate to just say all those sets are gone and now it's just cleaning up the few that missed the nets of the past. I just don't see these around any longer. Every dealer used to have boxes of them unless they had just shipped off a bunch or cut them up for the cash register but they aren't there. Many of the nicest surviving sets are being sold at sky high retail prices and the rest are being dismantled.

There are varieties, Gems, great coins, and profits in them thar sets and a few are looking for them and cutting up everything.

Rather than projecting out 232 years maybe we should worry about whether or not we'll run out next week.

Insiders can't see this because insiders know that if they raise their buy prices the sets will flood in because mintages were so high. But those who work on the margins or have watched these markets for decades can see it. The tiniest change in psychology and sellers will simply evaporate and buyers left high and dry.

It is an evolutionary process. Many of those coins will end up in slabs. Others to albums, coin tubes, or junk box. Some may be spent.

@MasonG said:

@JBK said:
I'm assuming that they are building rolls. The way they are handling the coins, though, I'd expect the rolls to be subpar. For me, proof rolls have always been a questionable way to package supposedly collectable coins, though, since when you drop them into the tube you inevitably get an edge hitting the face of the coin below.

I don't know how the OP does it but you can stack the coins and slide them into the tube in a group if you want to limit opportunities for contact marks.

Proof coins are far too fragile for rolling into a tube. I use saflips and virtually eliminate the risk of contact marks. A really nice proof goes into a saflip that I seal. The seal I get with my sealer is virtually waterproof.