Road Report

Prologue:

After weeks of sorting new collections, verifying die varieties, getting coins ready for grading, and CACing, and photography, Team CRO is finally ready for the ANA show. Yay!

As confirmed by the fact that we are already here in Pittsburgh, comfortably resting in our hotel room which so far has been great except for the part where we could not get our door open despite the key actually seeming to work, and your author throwing his shoulder into it multiple times like in a 1970s police procedural.

But all was eventually resolved, we are ready for action and that is a good thing, since Dealer Day starts in a matter of hours and CRO will be right in the middle of it (literally), setting up at Table #1308 where we will remain for the entire week ready to buy, sell, trade, grade and of course schmooze all day, every day.

So if you are in the area, we hope you will stop by and see us.

But even if you can’t, you can still follow along with all the action in our RRs to be posted here every morning (like this one, for example).

August 24th: Dealer Day

Monday would begin in fine fashion, as Team CRO was up and out early, enjoyed an excellent breakfast in the hotel restaurant surrounded by dozens of other dealers, and then eventually migrated over to the convention center for the exciting kick off to the week with the 9 AM start of Dealer Day.

One small matter to handle first though, as we’d need to swing by the registration desk, scan the handy ANA QR codes they emailed us last week and quickly print out our shiny new show badges.

So of course we were surprised to encounter some massive lines there with hundreds of dealers just standing there. And not moving. Without any other choice, we joined in and ended up in said queue for 2 $@#&!%$# hours. Eventually reaching the front where we never scanned anything, and a helpful attendant handed us our badges in a process that literally should have taken 45 seconds.

But of course the ANA staff explained what the problem was and apologized profusely for the looooong delay is what I wish I could be writing here. The reality is no one said anything, and there was never any explanation of any kind. So not exactly a well oiled machine here, and even worse marks for customer service.  I’m just surprised none of our dealer brethren truly wigged out and started yelling since this isn’t always the most level headed group.

Eventually we made it inside though, quickly set up our wares and were ready to do business at 11.

And then proceeded to buy and sell like crazy for the rest of the day, in all categories, from small to XXL, US and world, soup to nuts, etc.

So by the 5:30 ending, we were exhausted and ready to have a drink in the Westin bar before heading to dinner at a place a few blocks away with some dealer and collector friends.

Then walking back to the hotel and turning in early so we could be ready for the first official day of the show where we sincerely hope that the registration snafus will have been resolved and getting into the show is a smooth and easy process. I would not bet on that though.

EOM

August 25th: Day 1

Now fully immersed in our Pittsburgh ANA routine, we were up early again on Tuesday, back to breakfast at the hotel, and then off to the convention center at about 8:30 for the start of the ‘regular’ show.

Where we had a couple of hours of dealer set up time before the Early Birds could come in at 11, followed by the regular attendees two hours after that.

Not that these various tiers of visitors are totally obvious from our vantage point at the table, since it was busy and active right from the start, and we saw plenty of collectors early in the AM who were enterprising enough to get their names on show tables and thus gain early access that way, giving them the first shot at our offerings here.

And while they snagged a bunch, we also sold all kinds of coins to all kinds of collectors and dealers alike for pretty much the entire day. Including some straightforward outright sales, one even swap of a US coin for one of our world coins, a few more complicated trades, a couple of layaways, etc.

We also bought a lot of cool coins that walked up to the table, including things that we owned years ago and were thrilled to get back, but also coins that looked like ex-CRO items but apparently were not since I could not find them in our database.

With a number of these transactions all happening simultaneously, a hallmark of an ANA, where your author is multi-tasking like crazy, showing coins to three different people, valuing potential trades, taking coins on consignment and holding down the fort. Predictably, this seems to happen just when MaryAnn leaves to submit our grading, or deliver a coin to someone on the other side of the room, so I psychologically prepare myself for an onslaught any time she steps away from the table.

Somewhere during all that we had an especially interesting transaction where another dealer showed me a cool, early coin that I instantly recognized as one that he and I had discussed 15 years ago at a Baltimore show. Back then we had determined it was worth about 25% less than the seller wanted, and so we passed. But here at this show it was finally buyable at the right level, we agreed to split it, and then literally 3 minutes later my dealer partner sold it and just handed me my share of the profit. So that was either a lightning fast deal, or one that took a decade and a half to congeal, or kinda both.

With almost non-stop action continuing until late in the day when it was time to pack up and head out to dinner with some long time collector friends at an excellent restaurant nearby called Eleven. Honestly, you could tell it was going to be good just based on the number of other dealers we saw there, since this industry is filled with foodies who always scout out the best places in every city.

And we pretty much closed the place down, getting back to the hotel late and once again turning in early so we could be rested and ready for, we hope, some equally head-spinning action on Wednesday.

August 26th: Day 2

10 Interesting Things that Happened at the ANA on Wednesday

For the third day in a row I had the exact same breakfast in the hotel restaurant, which I do not think I can do even one more time.

We sold a whole bunch more world coins to multiple different vying collector and dealer buyers. About which one of the world dealers commented to me that our table was far from the world section, and if it was closer we might have sold even more to that crowd. That could be true, but through the years we have sold a lot of world coins to US buyers, so I kinda think it worked out just fine.

We were again offered a lot of cool coins at the table, some of which we snapped up instantaneously. Others were super nice but priced at ~2X the level that made sense to us, so we left those for the next guy.

I randomly walked around the room and found some cool coins in unexpected cases, and in each instance the seller told me he could not write me an invoice since he did not have any. But of course we are now ready for that, since we started bringing blank generic invoices to shows just for such occasions. Hey, paperwork is important.

Someone from the ANA staff came and explained to me what had happened on Monday during registration, and all I will say is that it did not make me feel any better.

A dealer friend unexpectedly brought us lunch on Wednesday, but even more unexpectedly, it was lunch that he had made, not some store-bought fare. I have to say that was extremely thoughtful, and totally delicious.

We were asked to split 5 or 6 coins with other dealers on this day, but not one of them screamed CRO to me. Of course tomorrow we could bat a thousand on such offers, so I hope people will keep trying.

I was walking past the mint exhibit late in the afternoon just as some guy came walking out of the ladies restroom. I have no idea what that was about, and I don’t want to know.

We sold our second Washington Funeral Medal at this show, neither of which ever made the website. Conclusion: Washington Funeral Medals are hot!

Our show grading started to trickle back late in the day, and so by tomorrow some of those may go directly into the bourse cases. We hope.

We packed up around 5:30 and raced out the door so we could make it to Fig & Ash for dinner with some dealer friends. We were super proud of ourselves for discovering this secret new restaurant when we were here in 2023, but after seeing a bunch of other dealers there this time we can safely say that the secret is out. Great place though.

Then headed back to the hotel after and swerved to avoid someone doing a photoshoot right in the middle of the road under that yellow bridge shown at the top of this page. Obviously we are not the only ones who thought it was photogenic.

Finally getting back to the hotel so we could rest up for what figures to be an action packed Thursday which will include all of the usual activities on the bourse floor, and as much lot viewing as we can shoehorn in for the various upcoming auctions.

EOM

August 27th: Day 3

We decided to change things up on Thursday here at the show, as your author got up even earlier, had breakfast in the restaurant solo and then raced over to the convention center for some intensive Heritage lot viewing on the 3^rd floor right when they opened at 8 AM.

Where I pored through hundreds of boxes of US and world coins, while MaryAnn headed straight to the show at about 9.

And then we reconvened at our deluxe booth #1308 at about 9:58, just as a ravenous group of collector attendees were about to burst through the door (I know this because I had to pass through said door, and that crowd was extreeeeemely antsy, more so after I was allowed to enter before 10 AM with my dealer badge, and they were not).

So I kind of expected a lot of action at the table, and I was not disappointed, as we were busy right from the start and continuing all day, with virtually non-stop visitors to the table until 5:30 in the afternoon.

And while that could have meant having three or more people looking at coins all at once and total chaos for us, it didn’t really happen that way. For the most part, serious collectors stopped by single file, scanned the cases, picked out coins, completed their business and then departed just as the next person arrived.

Of course we didn’t plan it that way, but if we had planned it it would have looked exactly like that, as we had time to fully engage with each visitor, talk about coins in detail, and then write a lot of invoices. A lot a lot.

With sales once again in all product categories, including new things acquired here, coins remaining from our last Early Bird, and some fantastic coins that had been on our site far longer than I ever expected them to be.

So as 5:30 rolled around we were deeply satisfied, totally exhausted, and of course ready for a drink, so we dumped our bags at the hotel and raced across town to the bar at the Grand Concourse with some dealer friends. And then had dinner in a literally grand room with food that was way better than I expected (since sometimes restaurants in cool settings like this kind of mail it in).

And then returned to the hotel at about 10 where I finally had the chance to enter all of my lots of interest onto my Heritage watch list, answer a bunch of email and then collapse in a heap.

The good news here is that we will be on the exact same schedule again on Friday, this time starting with Stack’s-Bowers lot viewing and, we hope, just as many visitors to the table.

And if there are, or even if there aren’t, we will blog all about all of it right here in just about 24 hours from now.

August 28th: Day 4

In a déjà vu all over again moment, your author was back at the convention center for lot viewing on Friday at 8 AM. But this time at Stack’s-Bowers, where I encountered a couple of other mega viewers (i.e. guys looking at a gazillion lots at breakneck speed) with stacks of boxes piled up in front of them. Though the stacks in front of me were even higher, since I of course view all the world coins too. In the roughly 25 years since the advent of the modern CRO, I still think I’m one of the only guys doing this. Well worth it, though, since there were a lot of cool ones in there.

Then 2 hours later it was time to race to the bourse floor, where I arrived just in time to find a long time customer already talking to MaryAnn. And while this could have been a happy harbinger of another day of non-stop numismatic action at the table, it did not really turn out that way.

Yes, we sold a bunch of coins, including some interesting and expensive esoteric issues and world pieces, but generally speaking the show sort of wound down during the day. Which worked out fine, since it gave us an opportunity to submit some take home grading, consign coins to auction for us and for customers, collect all of our last, late checks, organize our paperwork, and attempt to decipher the chicken scratch I wrote in my catalogs at lot viewing and start to transform them into a cohesive bidding plan for the auctions next week.

We also got back more of our show grading, including an esoteric item that required three attempts to get it into a properly labelled, correctly attributed holder, despite the fact that I had provided the correct attribution at the time of the submission, as well as a photograph of a different example in a holder for reference. Hey, no one said this would be easy, and when it does finally work there is a tremendous sense of satisfaction similar to what one might feel after scaling Everest, or maybe swimming the English Channel.

With out last deal of the day the sale of a colonial note which seemed too cheap to me even as I was writing the invoice. Made that customer happy though.

And then we finally packed up and headed to dinner at a Mexican restaurant up the street with dealer and collector friends, one of whom gave me a cool new pic for the Hat Attack section of the website. So if anyone has any other interesting CRO hat shots which provide some sort of website-friendly geographical context, we’d love to post them.

Saturday we’ll look to do whatever business can be done, clean up our last loose ends, pick up our final show grading (we hope), make sure all of our auction prep is complete so I do not have to shove 8 heavy catalogs into my briefcase, and then head home from where our last installment of this RR will be posted from the comfort of my couch on Sunday AM.

Until then, then –

August 29th: The Exciting Conclusion

Now back home, it’s time to summarize the just completed ANA show through another list of random CRO-bservations presented in no particular order:

We arrived at this show with 10 full PCGS boxes and left with 5.5, which means we sold a lot more than we bought here about which I have 2 comments:

1. We never know what will happen at a show, sometimes we sell a lot, sometimes we buy a ton, sometimes it’s about equal. Any or all of those are fine, we just take it as it comes.
2. I overheard another dealer telling someone in the hotel elevator that “dealers really come here to buy, and most people don’t sell much at shows”, so obviously others had a very different experience here.

I do not know how the chef at the Westin Hotel makes those scrambled eggs in the breakfast buffet so delicious, but I intend to find out.

To view all of the auction lots here in a relaxed and methodical fashion we really needed to arrive in Pittsburgh one day earlier, but if we had done that we would have been even more tired by the end of what was already a veeeeery long show.

For the entire week, it took great effort for us to get our hotel room door open. We complained multiple times, but were told there were no other rooms available, and that it can get like that during periods of high humidity.

On a slightly related weather note, I checked out the weather forecast for Pittsburgh before we arrived, saw that it would be very cool in the evenings and thus packed all sorts of sweaters and jackets. So of course it was in the mid 70s every night and I never needed any of them.

As always, I watched with interest the various business models employed by other dealers at the show, including several conducting sealed-bid auctions, one with a group of hifalutin coins offered at fixed prices, but only available on a first-come, first-served basis by email starting at a set time during the week, and one dealer who puts coins out with marked prices, but will only sell them to collectors starting at some specified future time which resulted in a giant crowd standing around the aisle waiting for that to begin.  I guess all of these methods can work, but I really just prefer the most straightforward, egalitarian model of listing things online or putting things out at a show and selling them to the first person who wants to buy them.

I did wonder out loud at dinner one night if it would be interesting to conduct a live Early Bird at a future show where I put the 51 coins in the case with marked prices, and then precisely at noon fire off a starting gun and sell them to the first willing buyer(s). I concluded that this could be chaos though, since you might have a whole bunch of people trying to peer into the case, people pulling coins out to look at them while someone else who might have been ready to buy can’t even get a look at what’s being offered, and disputes about who asked for something first, all while MaryAnn and I are trying to keep track of it all. So in the absence of any ideas that seem clearly better, I think we’ll just keep doing it they way we’ve been doing it for the last ~25 years.

Normally we get some especially interesting or eccentric people at the table during a major show (such as the famous Pants Man from Baltimore in 2018), but thankfully that did not happen here and it was smooth sailing and totally professional from start to finish.

We sold two coins that I purchased at the EAC show in May here within 20 minutes of each other to two different buyers. I was genuinely surprised that those did not sell more quickly, but sometimes it takes a while to find the right buyer(s).

Early in the week MaryAnn suggested in an abundance of caution that it was best not to eat lettuce on this trip so as to avoid the cyclospora parasite, so I went an entire week of eating like a carnivore, never once had my usual Caesar salad, and was delighted to get home Saturday and immediately have one using lettuce we get locally from some hydroponic farm.

We graded a bunch of coins here, but many did not come back before we left on Saturday, so we’ll have to wait for those to be shipped to us and sort it all out later.

Speaking of sorting, we need to go through all of our invoices, update our inventory database and figure out exactly what happened here, but that is going to have to wait as we now will dive directly into auction mode for sessions that will be taking place throughout next week.

Which means our next EB will not be until after those conclude, at a time to be posted on our website header just as soon as we know it. So you might want to keep an eye out for that –

Finito