Buyers' Tip:  My popular "50 + 3" Bonus Coin Auctions are back, just in time for the Christmas Shopping Season.  "50 + 3" Bonus Auctions will be sprinkled in among my regular Penny Roll Auctions, and are clearly marked as such.  Extra action & fun in every "50 + 3" auction!  Please do keep an eye open for these special listings! 

Another Great Customer Testimonial:  On 11-12-2009 a frequent auction winner on my site not only entered some really great Buyer Feedback on eBay, but the Buyer also sent a heart-warming message through the eBay system to my attention.  With the Buyer's permission, he has allowed me to copy & paste the message here.  Hope you won't mind reading his kind thoughts: 

"Dear ketuzinho,

...Your rolls are absolutely amazing. that last roll had a 1909 vdb in at least EF condition. Best coin in my collection. Thanks. Every roll from you is a fair deal. I don't know how some guys leave you neutral feedback. Good luck with your auctions!!!

Adventure Story of the Month:

I kind of equate eBay to a Buyer's visit to a "Virtual" version of a Very Large Coin Show.  This place is huge!  You, a potential Buyer, have come here to try to find a small amount of harder-to-come-by-coins.  You would like to add to your and your family's hobbyist coin collections.  Maybe upgrade some coins not showing well in your albums, too.  But the majority of the Seller tables are operated by coin shop owners and commercial entrepreneurs. 

As you try to shop around the commercial tables, you notice that the bulk of their inventories are super-high-grade.  Even the few pennies the sellers are "showing" are out of your price range--and even more, you wonder:  do these guys have any cheap pennies hidden inside a box or something?  If they have, for sure they would rather try to sell you 1 or 2 of these expensive pennies they are showing.  They have to buy their inventories just like every other coin re-seller, get a good price on the re-sale, make a profit after overhead too, you figure.   Simple fact makes you feel empathy for them:   just like you, they have to eat too.  Finally, you speak out to one of the dealers, "Do you have any more affordable pennies?"  He answers back, "No, those things weigh too much for me to bring to shows.  I keep them all at my store back home."

You feel like you are wasting your time coming to this show.  The more you look, every table you go to is also swarming with other people on the Buyers' side of the table.  Most of them are coin shop owners and commercial-grade bulk-traders.  They have come here to find good dealer-to-dealer trades in order to re-stock their store & coin trading inventories.  They are each one intensively negotiating bids & re-bids.  And the Sellers are only to happy to spend their time in order to seal the high-volume trade deal.  Aha, you think, that means that I am going to need to pay top retail to buy just a few of their coins.  They are jacking up their prices because so many different commercial Buyers are cross-trade bidding against you. 

So you hang around a couple of tables for a few minutes, nobody cares.  They just keep on bidding & re-bidding until the final unit price is waaaay over what you are willing to spend.  Kind of sadly you divert your attention to listen in on the spins and yarns taking place among the negotiators' description of things instead.  The Seller seems to be inflating things a bit.  The Buyer, knowing he will soon enough learn exactly what is actually in the lot he has bought & taken home, is giving him feedback raising doubt that he will find anything thrilling at all about the quality or quantity of the coins after he gets them home.  

You walk away wearing a bit of a devilish grin.  You have learned a few new things.  For one, at a show like this, the best that you could hope for was to pay at least as much at the show as any brick-and-mortar coin shop likely would sell to you.  For two (you sort of chuckle) these guys sure do spin a lot of entertaining yarns.  Some of them had left you feeling like the Sellers might have been stretching the truth to the edge of the envelope.  Heck, you think again, like I always say, commercial merchants have to eat too.

So you give it a big shrug, and you aim off to fetch a cup of coffee.  Might as well just enjoy the show instead of buying up anything here.  You certainly haven't seen any hobbyists like you trying to sell their stuff here.  With all these commercial Buyers & Sellers swarming the place they probably would not pay a Hobbyist any attention.  Any wholesale price a commercial Buyer might offer him here would, anyway, probably be less than they would pay to anybody wanting to sell their collection back at their store.

Coffee in hand, you wander around the tables aimlessly.  You spot a friendly face carrying a little plastic bag with some penny rolls inside.  Hi, you say to the gentleman.  You ask him where he'd bought his pennies.  Oh, the man happily tells you, I bought 6 display pennies and a couple of rolls of these yesterday.  When I got them home, I found quite a few hard-to-find early wheats and lots of Indian Heads inside the rolls that I could use.  That guy is good!  He is selling off his family's coin collection.  The only reason I came back today was to buy 6 more rolls and I got 18 display pennies.  Man, I've been wanting some of the displayed coins for years.  The way he's selling them, the past couple of days at least, he packages his display/rolls together for each bid: 3 visible coins for you to inspect and 1 "blind" roll at a time.  Hey, the Seller's table is right over there.  That one with the red sign on it.  He calls himself...I dunno...it must be a nickname or something.  I think it is Karuzenoh or something.

You trot yourself over to the table, take one look, and whallah!  Ketuzinho has a small display of really nice coins, and hundreds of wrapped up penny rolls filling up open boxes.  You ask the Seller "How Much?  I don't see any prices." 

He jokes around with you, oh, I am just a hobbyist too old to keep a large coin collection like this one any more.  I am using this show to help me get rid of them.  I don't have any fixed price.  It's your job to figure out how much one of my packages is worth to you.  Just make me a bid anything over $0.99, fine with me.  I am trying to sell these 1 deal at a time.  Each deal being any 3 coins you pick out, and a 50-penny roll.  They all contain a mixed variety of  Indian Heads & Lincoln Wheats:  I pick the roll without looking out of that box they're in....

.... Oh, and I want to tell you, every one of those coins on display have some of their brothers in the total lot of tens of thousands of pennies that went into my penny rolls.  There is a decent chance you might find a couple or more of the brothers, at least, in whatever 50-penny roll I hand you.  I can't tell you which ones are in which rolls of course, I have no idea.  You might end up with a zero.  I have never had a complaint about somebody getting a zero yet, anyway....

....By the way, that $0.99 bid offer I told you about doesn't mean anything.  So be mindful of this little rule of mine:  I have a little timer clock right here.  I started it before you got here.  You see?  Only a little bit more to go before the bell goes off.  You have to wait around until the bell rings.  I will only accept the highest bid at the moment the bell sounds.  If anybody else shows up, and outbids you, you've gotta be quick on your toes.  Neat little trick, isn't it!  That way I can be pretty certain these coins are gonna sell for a lot more than $0.99 during this show.  Besides, a mini-auction like this is the only way I can happily sell these things without having to bicker with all these dealers trying to "steal" my entire collection at some ridiculous wholesale price....

....So, if you do decide to bid on one of my packages, please do be careful to be ready to bid whatever is your personal limit, just in case.  Believe it or not, you are not the only retail Buyer hunting for an opportunity like this one.  Anytime that bell is about to go off, there are a lot of people who show up out of nowhere and really get the bidding going.  Everybody loves an auction, don't they.

Wow, you think, this Ketuzinho guy is really friendly and he sure is generous to tell you a lot about what to expect if you buy from him.  That guy who caused me to come over here sure was happy with his wins from Ktuzinnoo (oh well), too.  This is great!  I am going to bid!  

You pick out 3 coins that you want, and Ketuzinho pulls a roll out of the box next to him.  All the time he is looking in your direction instead of the box you while you make your best bid offer.  Wow, this fellow didn't even look at whatever roll he pulled out of the box, you confirm.

Oh, he tells you as an afterthought, I don't let anybody look at the end coins of any of the rolls until after the final bid is paid for.  That's because these are randomly mixed rolls.  I don't have any idea what is in them.  One time a guy spotted an Indian Head on the end of his roll.  He came back in here shouting hallelujah to me because he tried to spoof me that I had advertised he was going to get 50 Indian Heads.  He demanded I hand him 50 Indians right then and there.  I offered to refund him if he'd give me his roll back as I had sold it to him.  He refused.  Well, he starts shouting "Not As Advertised!  Not As Advertised!  The security supervisor from that Palsy-Walsy bank over there came running to my rescue and kicked the complaining yammerer right out of here.  But his damage was already done:  I didn't have quite as many folks coming over to my table for a little while.

Well, sure enough, before Ketuzinho's little alarm clock rings, here comes a really nice lady from somewhere out of your view.  She outbids you!  Then another guy barges in, he ups the ante again.  So do you!  Aha!  The bell rings.  You are the winner!  You pay Ketuzinho, and in a flash you are on your way home with your lucky purchase!  You feel a bit of euphoria:  you have exactly the 3 coins that you wanted.  And, when you get home, you can't wait to open the roll up with your family, and share the excitement of what you might find inside! 

Bingo!  The coins were just exactly as good as the previous buyer had told you.  Man, the whole family had a fun time fishing through them.

Before you go to bed that night, you resolve to invite the wife and kids to go back to the show with you in the morning.  You and your wife agree on a budget to enable each of you and the kids to each pick out 3 coins on display and 1 roll of pennies.  It your way to makes sure that everyone of your loved ones can equally share the adventure of adding new coins to their albums.  You decide that maybe you & the wife ought to keep an eagle's eye on the kids while they make their bids!  Somebody might show up from out of nowhere and outbid the kids' "budget."  No way.  You simply were not about to let the kids walk out of there empty-handed!

Thank you for spending this time with me.....please come back again soon.  I will be posting new adventure topics & new tips on an average of once per month.

"Ketuzinho"

Copyright (C) 08-02-2009