US Mint Addressing Challenges of High Demand

The past two years have been a very challenging period for the United States Mint – the world’s largest coining facility – as it seeks to deal with a series of challenges on multiple fronts. From the covid-19 pandemic and its variants, which the Mint’s Director David J. Ryder called a “Black Swan” event at a forum with the numismatic media on August 25, to the sharp spike in demand for its products – whether they be silver and gold bullion American Eagles or collector versions of those coins with the popular, new reverse design – plus issues many collectors face when ordering especially hot collector coins, the Mint has had to keep working to adapt to these difficult circumstances and improve the customer experience.

In fact, under Ryder’s tenure, which began in April 2018, the Mint has added over 100,000 new customers and revenue that had been declining when he arrived is now rising for bullion and collector products. Ryder said that under his management the Mint has gone “after new customers with creative, new products” designed to increase the level of interest in the Mint. Those include coins like the 2019-S Enhanced Reverse Proof American Silver Eagle, which is tied for the lowest mintage coin and key to this venerable series that sold out of its 30,000-mintage within 20 minutes on November 14, 2019.

Others are the new Morgan and Peace silver dollar coins, which are expected to become an ongoing series and the various coins issued last year to mark the 400^th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower in Plymouth, MA in 1620 that included silver and gold coins made by our Mint and the Royal Mint and the 2020-W "V75" privy mark American Silver Eagle and Gold Eagles issued for the 75^th anniversary of the allied victory in 1945 – coins that never would have seen the day of light if the Mint had not used its existing statutory authority to produce gold coins and silver medals without congressional authorization.

Pandemic

The pandemic has resulted in a whole series of issues for the Mint from changes in production procedures to protect Mint staff to some temporary closures of some branch mints as well as big ramp-up in the production of circulating coinage, which has not been circulating as it normally does during the pandemic because people are often staying home and sticking to electronic payment methods, especially last year when many believed the virus could be transmitted through germs on coins and paper money, which we now know is not the case.

But as Ryder noted during the meeting last week with the press, compared to many other world mints, the U.S. Mint has been able to accomplish these tasks with less disruption and fewer and shorter shutdowns. In comparison, the Mexican Mint had to completely shutdown for much of 2020, and the Royal Canadian Mint stopped issuing collector coins for a period to focus on the rising demand for bullion products during this period.

In addition, all this has been happening at the same time the Mint has worked to rollout the new American Silver and Gold Eagle reverse designs, and just after the passage of various legislative measures for new coin programs including the silver dollars and the American Women Quarters program that starts in January, which Director Ryder said has the potential to generate billions over the next decade in sales of the various versions of the coins.

Rising demand

The demand for Mint coins has been through the roof since the start of the pandemic, which initially was focused on bullion sales of American Silver and Gold Eagles. To get a better handle on the true level of demand for those coins, the Mint now receives quarterly projections from its network of Authorized Purchasers.

Rising demand grew to include numismatic coins too like the 2021-W and 2021-S  American Silver Eagle Proof coins that both sold out right away as well as the American Gold Eagle Proof coins sold individually and in a 4-coin set plus a special 2-coin tenth-ounce designer set.

Matt Holben, who is the Mint’s Associate Director for Sales and Marketing, said that in 30 minutes on the day the West Point Silver Proofs were released the Mint sold more coins in that time than it did for the same product in 2019 and 2020 over a 9-month period, which had a lot to do with the interest in the new reverse designs and the fact that we are in a very hot coin market today.

A lot of the sales especially this year of those coins came from orders received through the Mint’s subscription program that is not available for all products and which helps the Mint better gauge demand than it used to, which sometimes led to needing to melt unsold coins.

Order management

Many customers have had problems ordering these kind of high demand coins if they did not use the enrollment process and sign up early enough, or if it was not an option for a particular release. Those problems have in the past two years often been caused by the use of scripted programs or bots designed to circumvent the Mint’s ordering limits used by certain buyers, including buyer groups.

But while as much as 60% of web traffic used to come from bots, the Mint said it now has legal authority to block most of them, and the sale of the 2021-W and 2021-S Silver Proof coins went more smoothly than prior high-demand releases, according to Mint officials.