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Wondering if generations from now, people will not be as interested in coins for collecting as they would just see them as some strange relic and scoff at paying large sums of money for a disc with metal value that is fractions of a percent. Much like how the argument is made that preppers would have minimal utility from gold coins when food and guns and medicine would do so much more. I guess the wealthy would still have coin collections because they would view it like art and understand that other wealthy people would covet it?

I don't think coin collecting would go away for people with money but in the future if coins are no longer circulating, few newbies will take a try at coin collecting. It will be curious what happens to all the collections out there.

I view current coin collecting as actually finding coins in the wild or perhaps doing a bit of trading. To me collecting coins is not finding them on Ebay or a coin dealer and purchasing them. I think the US Mint had a good concept with the State quarter series, but then over did it and it slowly lost appeal.
With that in mind, pennies are still the best bet to find many in circulation. The silver years of dimes, quarters, halves, and dollars would be impossible.
My opinion as to your question is, yes there will be less interest in collecting coins as younger people deal less with cash and most certainly coins. Who knows, we may be a cashless society in the not so distant future.

Could be that the number of collectors wane while the value of collections increase. Coins desired for completing a collection might get harder to find.

I think that, to an extent, coin collecting has ALREADY lost it’s appeal.

Let’s compare coins now with stocks and let’s take Apple (AAPL) as an example. Let’s say a coin dealer sells me a rare date coin for, say, $200. A month later I realize I desperately need money and have to sell it back to the dealer. He might give me $140-160 for the same coin, which is understandable as he has rent, salaries, insurance and other expenses to pay.

Now let’s say instead that I bought Apple stock for $192 a share. The difference between the bid and ask on that and most stocks in just one to a few cents per share. I don’t even pay a commission to buy or sell the stock. (Thanks Robinhood, for getting this to happen, even though my accounts are with Schwab). If the stock is unchanged over the next month, I could get out with a loss of perhaps only a few cents per share, well less than 1/10 of 1%. And I can even trade gold, silver, copper, nickel and miners as well. I don’t like being told to be patient for 10-20 years and I should be fine. I, and most people in my opinion, are way less patient now than we were even 10-20 years ago.

Coin collecting is a hobby that requires patience, lots of it. Sad, but true.

I went to a local coin club meeting in the past few weeks. There were about 20 people there. Of the 20, only 1 or 2 was under age 50. Only 2 were female. Both of those things are very sad!

pmbug wrote:Could be that the number of collectors wane while the value of collections increase. Coins desired for completing a collection might get harder to find.

Coins to complete a collection may indeed be harder to find, but many collectors don’t really care. Truthfully, if I found, say, a 1938-D half in the wild, I’d likely want to trade it straight up for a fair amount of 90% silver, which would be MUCH EASIER to sell without using FeeBay.

Yes. Every person has there face in a phone nowadays. People don't even want there change, or ask you if you want your change back! Uh yes I want my 3 cents thank you. A coin collection handed down to a family member may be kept and even added to I would hope. But I feel all the gold and silver would be sold and the rest spent or dropped in a coinstar. I saw somewhere during the Covid coin shortage people were using up there state quarters from there albums as coin was hard to get.

Cashless society no coins needed so no interest in collecting them no matter what the Quarter of the month image is.

hobo finds wrote:Yes. Every person has there face in a phone nowadays. People don't even want there change, or ask you if you want your change back! Uh yes I want my 3 cents thank you. A coin collection handed down to a family member may be kept and even added to I would hope. But I feel all the gold and silver would be sold and the rest spent or dropped in a coinstar. I saw somewhere during the Covid coin shortage people were using up there state quarters from there albums as coin was hard to get.

Cashless society no coins needed so no interest in collecting them no matter what the Quarter of the month image is.

I don't know how I found this Reddit sub the other day but there was this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoomersBeingFo ... onspiracy/

The sub is like peeking into a joke writing session for SNL. Don't know if people are at odds that much with older generations or it is just blowing off steam, but I digress. There is a mindset which has been increasing since credit cards went nuclear in cramdowns on students back in the 1990's to harsh on cash. I guess Dave Ramsey has a +1 in this department the way he emphasizes using cash or a debit card to rope in your budget.

Very few people collect coins, and on a percentage basis its way down in the U.S.

If you look at numismatic premiums, they are much lower in other countries meaning the interest in coin collecting is even less outside the US.

Lemon Thrower wrote:Very few people collect coins, and on a percentage basis its way down in the U.S.

If you look at numismatic premiums, they are much lower in other countries meaning the interest in coin collecting is even less outside the US.

I think premiums are lower in other countries because they are (in general) less affluent than in the U.S.

That's fair, but compare it to stamp collecting.

There is a similarly small percentage that collect stamps. Anecdotally I think premiums for stamps in the UK remain high but for coins it never got to US levels.

I think its a dying business.

JerrySpringer wrote:

hobo finds wrote:Yes. Every person has there face in a phone nowadays. People don't even want there change, or ask you if you want your change back! Uh yes I want my 3 cents thank you. A coin collection handed down to a family member may be kept and even added to I would hope. But I feel all the gold and silver would be sold and the rest spent or dropped in a coinstar. I saw somewhere during the Covid coin shortage people were using up there state quarters from there albums as coin was hard to get.

Cashless society no coins needed so no interest in collecting them no matter what the Quarter of the month image is.

I don't know how I found this Reddit sub the other day but there was this post:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoomersBeingFo ... onspiracy/

The sub is like peeking into a joke writing session for SNL. Don't know if people are at odds that much with older generations or it is just blowing off steam, but I digress. There is a mindset which has been increasing since credit cards went nuclear in cramdowns on students back in the 1990's to harsh on cash. I guess Dave Ramsey has a +1 in this department the way he emphasizes using cash or a debit card to rope in your budget.

I made the mistake of reading through some of the posts in that blog. Online blogs tend to collect the extremes of any belief, and they feed on each other, so I hope those posters are the 6 sigma extremes in that genre. But it is edifying to be reminded how disrespected the previous generations (the generations they owe their lives and prosperity and freedoms to) are by many of the newest generations. Fortunately, they don't speak for all of their generation (any more than I do mine).

Went into a local coin shop Friday afternoon. Was there a bit over an hour. Didn’t see a single other person inside the whole time and there wasn’t a single phone call. And the shop owner is a very nice guy who has been there many years.

Sad!

Recyclersteve wrote:Went into a local coin shop Friday afternoon. Was there a bit over an hour. Didn’t see a single other person inside the whole time and there wasn’t a single phone call. And the shop owner is a very nice guy who has been there many years.

Sad!

Was thinking of probably an unlikely but possible scenario of how a coin shop could have customers in the shadows. Fencing cash with higher priced collectible coins may be a way versus using art works to wash cash. Would money launderers even bother using coins to wash cash with nowadays -ie- buy slabbed 1909-S VDB pennies with official grading, for example, in person at a shop with cash? I guess the shop owner would either be suspicious, or the sale would be recorded and logged with the IRS/some gov agency? The shop owner may not even be willing to take that much cash. How the graded coin translates into washed cash? Maybe sold on Ebay afterwards?

All manner of collecting is on the downswing.

At our insulator shows the average age is around 60+. Coin shops here are getting scarce, and mostly open by appointment only. Those few things that young kids get interested in seem usually taken over by adults who drive prices beyond what a kid could afford (sports cards, pokemon)

Also, collecting normally starts with some level of normal daily interaction with the thing collected, or at least access to that thing 'in the wild'. Kids don't use coins. Kids don't send letters or postcards. My first insulators were recovered from abandoned (and a few not so abandoned) railroads, which today would probably carry a charge of domestic terrorism. All the easy pickins' are long gone anyway.

Come to think of it I don't see young people much interested in sentimental things.

Morsecode, what you just said is painfully true.

Morsecode wrote:Come to think of it I don't see young people much interested in sentimental things.

Fashion is what I am seeing they are beholden to. Either in apparel or gadgets.

$1100 for Sneakers

My kids still have an interest, some more than others, but mainly bc I'm a third gen collector. My youngest son is really into it, at least for now. He knows all about the copper vs. Zinc cents, the CS monitoring, all of it. My father also gave some of his collection to my son. I think the kids today need an example of someone already doing it to gain interest.

Thank God there is no such thing as collecting bitcoins!