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Collectors are buying them by the bag
Friday, February 04, 2000
By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In some quarters these days, some quarters are worth much more than a quarter.
For instance, at John-Paul Sarosi's coin shop in Johnstown on Monday, you could have gotten $34 for a roll of Pennsylvania quarters.
Now Sarosi will pay $38 a roll - nearly four times the $10 face value - so he can sell them for more to someone else - who will then sell them for even more.
"It's amazing: It seems like every day it goes up," said Sarosi, who's been in the business of buying and selling coins for 26 years.
What he's buying and selling a lot of these days are the U.S. Mint's new quarters commemorating all 50 states.
The first five, issued last year - Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia and Connecticut, in that order - quickly became hot collectibles, and they're just getting hotter.
For example: When the Pennsylvania coins came out in March, Sarosi was selling bags of 100 rolls, with a face value of $1,000, for about $1,200. Today he's willing to buy those same bags back for about $4,000.
Now that's one of the standard ways of dealing coins on the numismatic collector/investor market: sealed "mint-sewn" bags, bank-wrapped rolls, and uncirculated - unused - individual coins. The ones you might find in your pocket probably already have some wear, and aren't worth as much.
When these quarters became available from the mint and banks, people bought a lot of them and kept them in "mint" condition, betting they eventually would appreciate in value.
The mint is making limited amounts of each variety in production runs of just 10 weeks. The runs were 750 million for each of the first three coins, but the mint has been increasing the amounts to try to meet demand. The current issue, Massachusetts, which came out last month, will be cranked out to a total of more than a billion.
Sarosi said hardly anyone expected the first few issues to go so high in price so fast.
"I thought that for the first few years, they would stay, at the most, $20 a roll," he said. "I never realized how hard they would be to get. ... It caught most of the coin dealers off guard. It's not like we stockpiled a lot of these."
Now, thanks to intense interest in the coins, fueled in part by a U.S. Mint marketing campaign, he's buying as many as he can.
In a classified ad in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he said "It's worth your trip to Downtown Johnstown" to sell him your uncirculated coins. He's also offering $38 a roll for the Delaware quarters, which, he pointed out, is more than solid silver quarters are fetching. He's paying $18 and $11 per roll, respectively, for the New Jersey and Georgia coins. Connecticuts he doesn't need because he can still get them at banks.
He's reselling the coins at a markup of about $100 a bag to another company that resells them to collectors in sets of one coin for each state.
Dealers and others can buy coins directly from the U.S. Mint's Internet site - www.usmint.gov - but, as Sarosi has found, the coins go fast. In October, 700 million Connecticuts sold out in 4 1/2 hours. Ten million Massachusetts coins now are sold out, too. They're disappearing from banks as well.
Eddie Lowy of Banner Coin Exchange in Downtown Pittsburgh said he's not buying the quarters, but he has been selling them by the roll and individually.
"The new Massachusetts quarter for sale here," reads a signs on the door of his Fourth Avenue shop.
"The way the government has done this is brilliant from a marketing perspective," he said.
Indeed, all this interest is making a mint for the mint. By the time the last variety, Hawaii, is released in 2008, the U.S. Treasury stands to make $8 billion or more. Talk about having some good fiscal quarters.