For the last three months I have been visiting my local Medford, Oregon coin shop at least three times a week. I've been going to coin shops for 18 years now and I have never seen one as busy as this one. It has been family owned since the '60s and they regularly have a minimum of four family members working the counter. On some days, especially saturday, they will have five to six family members working the counters and many times even with six people being waited on there will still be a line of 10 or more people waiting to reach the glass display counters.
Because of the long wait in line I always make it a habit to listen to all the transactions going on and I see the same types of transactions being repeated over and over. By far the the most common are people either being or selling 1 oz generic silver rounds. Second most common is people scrapping gold jewelry. From what I've seen roughly 90 to 95% of all the transactions are stricly bullion related with a very small percentage being people buying non bullion items. In fact during all my visits and all the transactions witnessed I have yet to see one person ask to see a numismatic coin. They have "numis" in their display cases but no one ever asks to see any.
I've been buying average circulated Peace dollars and the owner told me for every 1 Peace dollar they sell they will buy 200 from the public. He said there is virtually no interest for average circulated, common date Peace or Morgan dollars and they will just accumulate them until they obtain 500 and wholesale them out to other dealers.
So at least from this part of the country all the public interest is centered on the buying & selling of bullion silver & gold in all forms; and public interest in "numi's" (raw or slabbed) is almost nill.