Thanksgiving, 2008: Thank you

Thank you.

Thank you to our loyal customers who make it possible for Dave and me to travel around the country going to coin shows and auctions instead of commuting to work at some company that makes widgets and serves as the inspiration for the comic strip ‘Dilbert’.

Thank you to the grading services who make it possible for us to buy nice, original coins and get them into reasonable holders where they can be marketed on our site and offered in a numismatic marketplace where it seems like about two-thirds of the other coins out there have been conserved and graded too high.

Thank you to all of the people who write to us and give us good ideas for new articles or CoinWorld advertisements.

Thank you to John and Helena at Identry, our crack IT team, who keep the website humming.

Thank you to Becky Arthur and the entire CoinWorld team, who help us get those ad ideas out of our heads and into the newspaper seamlessly.

Thank you to Stack’s, Goldberg’s, Bowers and Superior, who provided some wonderful buffets with full-sized plates, auctioned a lot of cool coins that we bought this year, and helped us sell a few too.

Thank you to our fellow dealers who buy a lot of things from us, offer us a lot of cool coins and tell us we’re insane just 3 or 4 times a month for offering old holder coins instead of cracking them out and trying to upgrade them 50 times.

Thank you to the kitchen and wait staff at Pazo’s in Baltimore, who reverted back to the old, better menu format and who fed us this year more than anyone else.

Thank you to Ron Guth and the guys at the PCGS table at shows who indulge us by putting pedigrees on coins, in a very specific format, and doing it exactly right every single time even though we know it’s a pain in the neck and they have a lot of other more important things to do.

Thank you to the Whitman team, for fixing the long-standing problem with the queue to get into the Baltimore show, and now making the whole thing run like clockwork.

Thank you to Bryce Brown, Karl Moulton, David Fanning and our other numismatic book and catalog suppliers, who have made it possible for us to reconnect hundreds of rare coins with their long-lost pedigrees.

Thank you to PCGS for providing the chatroom, and thus allowing us to hang out and talk coins at 3:00 AM with a lot of people with whom we disagree about almost everything.

Thank you to our insurance company, with whom we have never made a claim, but if we did, we’re sure it would be handled really smoothly.  Right?

Thank you to the hostess at the Sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills who knows what we will order the instant we walk in the door.

Thank you to Russ Stringham and Evan Goldenburg, for handling sales of our extra stuff on Ebay and running the whole operation like a well-oiled machine.

Thank you to Christine at our sign company, for producing a cool-looking CRO banner which can be folded and carried in a suitcase, unlike the old one which had to be transported in a fishing rod case which was a humongous pain in the butt to haul through an airport, and which one time get wedged in a doorway, horizontally, in Orlando.

Thank you to the entire team at Heritage, who conduct the most efficient, transparent auctions in the business and generally make running the largest collectibles company on earth look pretty easy.

Thank you to the C4 club, for providing a totally different take on numismatics, some wonderful camaraderie, an excellent newsletter and a really cool convention and auction as part of the Baystate Show.

Thank you to photographers Mark Goodman, Doug Plasencia and Neil Rothschild, who make every coin look (almost) exactly like it does in real life.

Thank you to the USPS, who are the butt of a lot of jokes (some of which are extremely funny), but who have done a really terrific job for us and without whom I’m not sure how we’d manage to get by.

And finally, thank you to our wives and families, who put up with what certainly must seem like some unbelievable nonsense, and crazy hours, and frequent travel, and phone calls at all hours, etc., and who have been incredibly supportive of us in this not-so-little-anymore venture.

Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!

DW & JA