"Unsearched" Defined

(As used in the eBay coin market)

Have you ever noticed how frequently coin sellers on eBay advertise groups of coins as "unsearched"? It is such a banal term on eBay that I have come to ignore it, except to occasionally chuckle to myself when I notice it as part of an obvious attempt to increase sales of an inferior product.

I have yet to find a group of coins that I think is truly "unsearched". The history of most circulated collectable coins is as follows: They get circulated for a few years until a collector finds them and puts them into coin albums; the albums get sold to a coin dealer when times get tough or by the grandchildren who inherit them; the coin dealer dumps them in buckets (watching for the obvious high dollar coins as he does, of course) and sells them to other collectors or dealers; the collectors or dealers sort them by dates or categories and sell the majority to other collectors or dealers, except for the nicer ones they pick out that bring higher dollars as individual coins or match an empty slot in an album; the majority then get mixed back in with larger groups of similar coins which then change hands (sometimes after being stored for a while) again and again, getting sorted for notable coins at many steps of the way.

One imaginable way to acquire "unsearched" coins would be to find a horde of coins someone has been pulling out of circulation and stashing away for many years without any knowledge or regard for the value of any particular date or condition of coin. Such a lot could be a fairly random sampling of coins and may possibly contain its fair percentage of the higher dollar coins -- but then as the dealer who purchased it, how would you know if it was such a lot without searching through it? And very few dealers I know would be able to resist the urge to look through it to find those 1909 S VDB pennies that must have gotten into the group.

But if most circulated coins go the route of changing hands from dealer to collector many times over, what really does "unsearched" mean here? Except for that very unlikely circumstance above, it seems to me that it wouldn't mean anything really useful about the coins. Although in all fairness, it could have a bit of value to the seller in that it gives the coins being sold an aura of mystery, generating a feeling of "there could be something really valuable in here!" without, unfortunately, conveying any truly factual information about the coins being sold.

If a guy is more or less honest about it when he labels a group of coins as "unsearched" to sell on eBay, he could mean that he hasn't personally searched through them. But they are almost certainly very far from being "unsearched". Even if the eBay seller hasn't personally searched through them, the constant weeding out process as collectable coins change hands over and over keeps most of the better coins carefully accounted for in the hands of collectors or dealers.

Another route that some coin dealers resort to is to label a group of coins as "unsearched" and then carefully make up a group that would be acceptable to the buyer, possibly throwing in a few nicer coins to ensure the recipient will be pleased. While this method does have its merits (if done fairly it should result in a happy customer and adequate profit for the dealer), it is still a bit dishonest in my opinion.

I personally prefer to be blunt and state what is contained in any group of coins I sell. If I am selling a random scoop from a bag of coins that have been picked through for high dollar coins, then I say so. If I am selling a lot of cull coins, that is how I promote it. And if I carefully make up a group of coins with a variety of different dates, including some higher dollar coins, then that is what I say in the description of the lot.

As a buyer on eBay I often think to myself: Wouldn't it be nice if everyone simply stated exactly what was being sold?

Best,
Derrick Enders
Dave's Collectable Coins eBay Store
(a division of FAS Coins Inc)