The Surprisingly Mundane Life Of A Coin Dealer

July 10, 2019 0 Comments

When I tell people I make my living as a coin dealer, many people think that the average day is just sitting around looking at coins! While I wish this were true, the reality is that most of what I regularly do to operate is extraordinarily mundane.

We ship out tons of packages. After a good weekend, we can easily have over 200 packages to ship out that Monday. Pulling, packing and printing labels can take a good portion of the day! Many times, we will not get all that much done on a Monday besides shipping everything out.

We usually keep around 5,000 pieces listed. That is quite a bit of creating listings on eBay and our website. Besides the time it takes to create the listings themselves, we also have to photograph everything! Then after photographing, we have to do the post-processing.

Obviously, it can be difficult to tell exactly what a coin is like in hand from pictures, so we get lots of emails and eBay messages with questions. Every single one of these needs to be responded to, and when we’re running an auction, 50 messages in a day is not unusual!

Another big task is keeping up with our accounting. With the large number of collections we purchase and our constant buying of better pieces, this occupies a good bit of our time, making sure we know exactly how much we are (or sometimes, are not) making!

Since we have been setup at our office location, we do get a decent amount of people who will call for an appointment and interested in either selling or consigning their collections. We take pride in making sure we pass along accurate information, and this can tie up a decent amount of time, especially if the collector has more unusual or eclectic material, as our clients tend to have!

After all of this is done, I can start to go through, price and card up new material. This is a part I enjoy. We use a combination of actually realized prices and price guides to determine this. One more obscure stuff, especially medals, this can be a bit time consuming, as it can require going through auction catalogs, sometimes in other languages!