Just Announced!!!

October 27, 2011 is going to be a very busy day for the Mint! The 25th Anniversary Set will be released, and I'm certain that both their web site and phone lines will implode, lol! I would assume that the usual time of 1200 hours will be the starting time for both avenues. Good luck.

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Permalink Reply by Bob on October 12, 2011 at 8:25pm

I can't wait. I will be in Ghana Africa on the 27th. The internet in the hotel that I stay in is not the most reliable so I hope it will be up and running that day. I don't think I could pay a family member enough to deal with the Mint's web site on the 27th. It may take quite a while to get an order placed that day.

Good luck to all.

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Permalink Reply by Gary on October 13, 2011 at 4:47am

I am curious of the packaging of these? More than likely we will have the same fiasco as the 2006 Sets? So do i risk placing an order for 2 and then place another order for 3 more right after? If they are planning on doing 5 per household?? Hopefully the will keep the mintage at 100,000 sets...That seems to be a good Collectible Number???

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Permalink Reply by Clair Alan Hardesty on October 13, 2011 at 7:48am

The 2006 three coin set had an initial stated mintage of 250,000 so this one is only 40% of that. That should mean that it will hold whatever value it settles on for the long term. The 2006 set has been fairly stable, selling for $100 from the mint then going straight to $400 before slowly dropping to $300 until the price of silver brought it back to $400 today. I have great hopes for the 2011 set doing something similar, especially since it has two unique coins.

I for one don't think that the ordering will be so bad. It might clog up at first simply because the mint has never actually done anything to fix their bottleneck but I don't think it will sell out the first day so ordering should be easy late on the 27th and for a few days after that. This thing is going to cost at least as much as (and most likely more than) an ATB slug and there will be three times as many of them available. The mint simply cannot process enough orders in one day to allow for a sell out unless every order is for five sets, and even then it would be a stretch for them.

The poor Glacier Park ATB comes out two days before the anniversary set. It will be lucky to sell any until after the Eagle set sells out.

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Permalink Reply by Buffalo on October 13, 2011 at 9:49am

I think the anniversary set will sell out as quickly as the Mint can process orders. All 4 of my family members and close friends I keep in contact with as far as what they are buying from the Mint intend to buy the household limit of 5, no one less than that. I plan to do the same. The Coin and Chronicles set sold out in 30 hours with a household limit of 1 if I remember right, so a 1 day sellout with a mintage twice as large but a household limit 5 times as large could very well happen. It might not, but I am going to order as quickly as possible.

I'm still not sure that the 100,000 mintage or limts are definite at this point. I see these have been added to the schedule but when I looked yesterday I didn't find specific details posted at the Mint site.

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Permalink Reply by Clair Alan Hardesty on October 13, 2011 at 12:21pm

The mint was specific about the 100,000 mintage and 5 set household limit in the initial press release so I think that those numbers will hold. In my records, the only times I see the mint taking over about 15,000 orders in a day is when subscription items come on sale and those don't require any customer interaction since the orders are actually already on the books. I do believe that this set will sell out very quickly, I just don't think that any of us that want to get them will have any problem doing so, even if we wait a few hours after noon to let the website settle down. Part of my thinking comes from what I perceive as a reduction in staffing at PBGS over the past year or so and I don't think they will add any resources just to help one item sell out quickly. Their past performance tells me that they are more willing to take occasional criticism for their shortcomings than to do anything about them. According to my records, orders declined from a long term average of about 70,000 orders per week to about 51,000 O/W last year. This year there has been a slight uptick to about 53,000 orders/week. This says nothing about the number of items or the value of orders, just the raw order count.

The real question for me is when we might expect to actually see our anniversary sets. In 2009, with the UHRDE SNAFU, my mint orders averaged 23.4 days from order to receipt (I typically order on the first day of availability). Last year that improved considerably to an average of 15.6 days. So far this year the average number of days from order to receipt has fallen all the way to 27.5 days, an indication to me that a reduction in staffing has occurred. PBGS has tried to hide this by lying about when items come in stock, trying to make it look like the slip is beyond their control. They now routinely claim that high demand items won't be available for two weeks, changing the availability date every day until they are ready to ship a large batch of orders. I don't necessarily fault them for trying to maximize profits, I just wish they would be open and honest about what is happening, something they seem incapable of doing.

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Wiseley on October 13, 2011 at 3:08pm

I received the Mints' Fall cataloge today, and what a waste of money that was! First- the prices printed hadn't been adjusted; the 25th Ann. Set wasn't listed; and so much more. A beautiful but basically useless item. They couldn't wait a week, and up-date the damn thing? I think I will still just start calling on the 27th at Noon, put the phone on speaker, and wait my turn. At least then I don't have to worry about their web site going down, lol!

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Permalink Reply by Buffalo on October 13, 2011 at 6:16pm

Clair, was there an actual press release from the Mint on these? The reason I ask, I know the numismatic press reported comments made by a Mint official giving those details, but I haven't been able to find a press release from the Mint like they normally put out. Or at least I couldn't find one sometime shortly after these were first reported, I really haven't looked for one since so good chance I missed one.

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Permalink Reply by Clair Alan Hardesty on October 13, 2011 at 10:19pm

Buffalo,

http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/index.cfm?action=press_release&...

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Permalink Reply by Buffalo on October 13, 2011 at 11:39pm

Thanks Clair, I missed it.

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Permalink Reply by Clair Alan Hardesty on October 20, 2011 at 5:44pm

The initial price for the 25th Anniversary set is $299.95!

http://www.usmint.gov/pressroom/?action=press_release&id=1296

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Permalink Reply by Bruce Wiseley on October 21, 2011 at 6:24am

Let the games and mayhem begin. Thank God for speed-dial, lol! This price is actually lower than I thought it would be. At $50 a coin, the secondary market will probably triple the price moments after it sells out. I just want one for myself, mostly because that's all I can afford! Good luck everyone.