If you don't want to melt them..... why not sell them for melt?? That would make the most sense.
Their are substantial cost to bring a order like this to the market. Unlike melting them which requires a single trip to the smelter offering these for sale involved preparation and logistical issues.
I don't have the a history of sales on the forum sufficient to self manage something this large so I had to hire someone to escrow this for me. I also needed other specialized services.
The services I needed were:
A) Each coin needed to be individually and carefully washed in acetone to remove the residual adhesive. I did not have the experience to attempt this myself.
B) Escrow: For an order of this size I needed a third party escrow.
C) Shipping: I needed to ship these all to California with insurance so they could be cleaned and then prepped for sale.
D) Packaging and sales: It was easiest to have escrow manage the sales, packaging, payments and shipping. However, this involves a tremendous amount of work trips to the post office and multiple e-mails back and forth for each sale.
All told the above represents hours and hours and hours of work. Tim was the most logical person to do this for me and he was gracious enough to agree to it but Tim is an extremely busy professional and his time is not free. All told my expense for all of the above after negotiation was $2700. Given the amount of work involved I was pretty happy with that.
To break even compared to just melting them down I need to sell 50% of these. It looks like that will probably happen with the price point I set. I chose a price I felt would be most likely to make these move without costing me money compared to what I could get by simply melting them down.
It is in my opinion a great price that I very much doubt will ever be seen again for these.
