I made the transition from a largely wholesale-based rare coin firm to a retail-based company around 1995. This was the year which I first posted a website (so technologically and design backwards by today’s standards that I would cringe to see it in 2023…) on the World Wide Web.

screen shot of website from 1998 — **Hello, 1998! No, really. this is from 1998.**

Between 1995 and the beginning of Covid, my business followed a pattern: go to a show, buy coins, process coins, get coins ready to sell by imaging and describing them, price coins, place them on the website, and sell them. The process had the occasional bump in the road but it was smooth and certainly familiar.

An integral component of this process was attending auctions and purchasing coins at these events. This sometimes meant some really long days at shows. As an example, if I were attending a gold coin session at an ANA show, it meant that I often wouldn’t be done with this until midnight or even later. Considering that I typically wake up at an ANA around 7:00 am, this meant at least one or two 18 hour+ days. Fine when you are 35, not so fine when you are 55+. I had reached the point where I was asking myself: “are you attending the coin show for the show or for the auction? You have to choose one because you aren’t physically able to do both.”

Things began to change somewhat around 2012-2013. I was buying fewer and fewer coins for inventory at auctions due to the fact that it was so easy to trace online what I had purchased. It was around this time that auctions became more retail-oriented and I often found myself competing for coins with my own clients.

Still, my schedule was such that I was able to return from a show with enough material that if I worked really hard over the weekend, I’d be able to go live with 20-30+ coins on the following Monday. I had clients hungry for good coins and I was able to provide them in around a two to three week cycle. This allowed me to have an extremely dynamic inventory which turned over close to once a month.

Then came Covid. The first thing to change was my supply chain. With no more shows, I was forced to really beat the bushes for coins. Luckily, I was able to buy some deals and I survived (and even flourished due to having around a 99% reduction of travel-related expenses).

Perhaps the single biggest change in the coin market’s infrastructure due to Covid was a huge increase in the significance of auctions. They became the de facto source for many new and veteran collectors.

Savvy auction companies quickly realized that they no longer needed coin shows to conduct sales. Their internet platforms made bidding easy and, in all honesty, I hadn’t attended any auction in person since 2018; and only critically important ones by this time.

When coin shows resumed in 2021/22, live auctions were no longer on the agenda for your evening’s pursuits. Personally, I was thrilled. As I said above, I was no longer willing to stay up until 11:45 pm waiting to bid on a Pioneer gold coin (consider me old-fashioned but on important, expensive coins, I still insist on either bidding live online or via phone). For a sleep-deprived coin dealer, not having to face eager collectors at 9am, going on five hours of sleep was exciting.

Auctions were now conducted live the week after a show. Which on the surface seemed great. But after living with this new normal for two years, I’ve discovered something unexpected which has put a kink in my delivery system.

I can no longer put my new purchases out the week after a major show due to the fact that I am busy bidding live in the sales and/or clients of mine are doing the same.

This slows down my selling and makes me hold inventory longer. This may not seem like much but if I hold off one week of selling new coins and multiply this by six times per year, that’s more than 10% less time I have available to sell you new purchases. That’s not an insignificant amount of time and to recoup this lost time, many dealers would simply raise prices (I don’t subscribe to this theory and won’t increase my margins due to this specific issue).

I can imagine at this point you are shaking your head and wondering: “what would it take to make this guy happy?”

I’m not asking for sympathy; faux or deserved. I still love what I do and am thankful every day of the week that I have such a great job. I’m just pointing out the irony in a situation where a seemingly great thing (auctions now being held after shows) turns into a seemingly not-so-great thing (having to hold back new purchases a week).

As the cliché goes, be careful what you wish for. In the comments section below, tell me about a numismatically relevant set of unintended circumstances which you have encountered.

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