“These are the exact same U.S. quarters that you have now in your pocket or purse.” — at least, that’s what you tell them when they come through the gallery or studio door.
Clear your throat, and continue:
“The only difference between your pocket change and my coins is the quality of the coin. Mine have no scratches, no dents, no dings, no stains and no wear and tear.
“You’re looking at the result of hundreds of hours, which is the time I spend finding the good coins, the ones that aren’t worn down or scratched or dented or stained or otherwise made useless for jewelry.
“You can have any grade of coin for spending money, but with jewelry, it has to be perfect, absolutely flawless, like a diamond.
You wait for a moment to get the effect, then continue:
“If you’ll take out your change for a moment and put it on this velvet pad,” (indicating the velvet search pad on the nearby table or countertop) “I’ll show you the difference.”
Do so.
If they exclaim, “Wow!!!” when they see your Perfect Coins, it means that they’re impressed by this display and they’ll probably be willing to buy the jewelry.
You’ve made a sale, but you’ll have to start somewhere, and it might as well be with showing them through your collection of 100 of my Pegboard Perfect coins, meaning that those are what you should be putting out there when YOU’RE doing the search, at that level and grade, and not a whit below that grade.
When you know how, you can search your own.
I plan to get you the skills to do your own thing.
You need some samples as reference points — not photos, but actual coins, and that’s what you’re going to get, samples of the best of the best, personally searched and collected and graded by me.
I take full responsibility for every coin in that collection. Any coin doesn’t meet your expectations, send it back and I’ll give you another one just like it.
In short, the only Business Strike quarters you’ll ever see better than those will come in PCGS slabs, and that’s a fact.
My coins are DNP — Dang Near Perfect.
So I’ve made up a sort of kit as a starter pack for your Coinology Mission — yes, it’s a mission, technically — and there’s a definite plan behind it, to get you the most and the best the fastest, so you can earn enough to handle what’s coming down the pike this year and well into the first half of the 21st century.
Here’s what you’ll get when you send me a $500 box of quarters:
- 100 Brilliant Uncirculated “DNP” Quarters, packaged for fast counter sales.
- 1 Finished DEMO Set — pendant & earrings in sterling silver.
- 4 Ready-for-Use empty sterling silver “Quarter” earring bezels.
- 2 Ready-for-Use empty sterling silver “Quarter” pendant bezels.
- 1 Framed & Wired 16″x20″ Pegboard Display System.
- 20 Retail Style Blunt Rounded “safety first” Metal Pegs.
- 5 FINISHED “Littleton Green” Coin Folders with over 200 high-grade quarters.
- 10 Acrylic Capsules for U.S. Quarters, plenty to make some 3-T Game Pieces.
Don’t forget that whenever you sell a game set with a lot of quarters that you are giving the customer a cash-back REBATE with the purchase, which the customer needs to appreciate when buying the set or any item containing cash money coins.
I’ll bet you’re wondering what “3-T” Games are.
On paper, they’re called “Tic-Tac-Toe”, but when you play on a board with gaming pieces, it’s a totally different and much faster strategy effect.
There are “right” moves and “wrong” moves and it’s all about attention and concentration. The fact is that tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, backgammon, craps dice, jacks, hopscotch, match game and “flip” are all ancient games that were originally developed to teach young princes how to conduct warfare, if they happened grow up.
Most kids didn’t.
“Strategy Games” call for mental effort and complex considerations, and that’s what makes them brain-trainers and gives them the flavor of profound mental skills development tools, as well as being profound tools for the perfection of multiple attention, something everyone with work aspirations could use.
You’ll find that the coin games are also a great way to acquire memory skills, and “Gorby’s Memory Trainer” which uses 32 quarters to achieve its effect, is the best way ever invented to build memory and expand your mental powers short of plastic brain surgery.
One great game that comes from great antiquity is the tabletop war-game called “chess” — you probably think you know something about it, but you probably don’t know that the Horses stand not for one single individual, but an entire phalanx of cavalry.
The Bishops are units of Republican Guards, and the Castles are rolling towers used to go over the walls of the castle under siege, hence the name, “Siege Towers”.
Of course the Queen is head of her own Guard, and the King stands with his Personal Bodyguard Troopers.
The Pawns? That’d be us. Get ready for hard times.
You might want to make some games.
I have sample games on hand, plus all the stuff you need to make your own with coins that YOU found in your own searches.
It’s easy to create those games, now that we have the box and a variety of liners with which to fill the box. We also have a shipping system that works well with the final product.
Always retro-design a product from the shipping carton backwards, so you KNOW you’ll be able to ship, when the time comes.
It almost doesn’t matter what the product is.
Games will sell. I have the acrylic capsules for all the games — some are larger, some are smaller, with variations in the coin-friendly archival foam rings.
You can order the supplies separately, based on what you actually plan to build with your own searched quarters, and you don’t need to buy very many of them at a time when you get them from me — one or two items is okay, no minimum.
If you do a lot of volume, you have to face a minimum charge per order. You’ll have to buy a lot of stuff at a time to get the wholesale prices, plus you’ll need a resale license.
Don’t forget, you are no longer in Kansas. This is Trumpworld, and that means slaving on the chain gangs to rebuild the infrastructure, unless you have enough cold cash to stay out of the way of the Press Gangs that take people away to the labor camps.
Oh, they’re not open yet, but they’re waiting for occupancy, and that means you.
Make some money, stay free, stay clear, stay clean, stay mobile.
That means trim down, take in the sails, get ready for bad weather — “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky in morning, sailors take warning.” — a fair assessment of the patterns of Earthian weather systems, if you ask me, and I don’t recall having been asked.
Consider the concept, then get on with it. You’ll have enough in the kit to make some sales and put up a very compelling and effective kiosk or “popup” table at a fair or other event.
That’s enough to get started. Of course, you’ll want a folding table — this you can get online or from K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Best or that sort of package store, for about $70 — you want the folding table, probably a 5-footer, but a 4-foot table will do very well, with enough room for the display case and the mannequin head, if you plan to use both.
You might or might not want a display case. Some folks prefer to lay their stuff right out on the table, and others think that getting ripped off is not okay, so they get a glass-topped locking brushed aluminum jewelry display case with a black French velvet pad. The case alone will cost about $75 from Rio-Grande Jewelry Supply, and the pad will cost about $40 extra.
I didn’t include them in the kit, because you might prefer another display system or none at all.
You can get away with no display system with my Street Peddler’s Kit, which consists of a set of Littleton U.S. Quarters from 1999 to the present, plus a bunch of business cards.
That’s all you need for a street operation.
You show the quarters in the albums, they select a quarter they like, pay for it, you ship.
“We ship!” is a battle-cry, a positive thing, a feature.
If you don’t do straight walk-up street interactions, and you tend to stay in the street fairs and craft fairs crowd, you might well prefer the aluminum display case and the mannequin jewelry display bust, just because they lend an air of value to the items.
The reasoning of your customers goes something like, “Well, if they’re in a fancy display case, they MUST be valuable.”.
I certainly wouldn’t automatically go there, nor might you, but the average customer will go right down that path, and the more credibility you can offer, the better, which is why we’re selling jewelry featuring genuine authentic U.S. Quarter Dollars in each and every piece of fine crafted jewelry, and by the way, those bezels are made here in California.
The coins are made in the U.S.A. as far as I know, but that may change under the present administration if the greed and personal corruption continues unabated, and there is no reason to think it won’t.
So the best you can offer the customer is, “At the moment, the coins are made in the U.S.A., but you’d better hurry — that may change at any moment.”.
You won’t sell a whole lot of coins like that, but you may succeed in selling a survival shelter and a Zombie Family Hot Chocolate Mix or two.
Oh, didn’t I mention that you should be selling the Zombie Family hot sauces and chocolate mixes and teas as well as coins?
You’ll find that they do complement each other, and there are some postcards that you might want to add to the mix, especially cards featuring your own home town!!!
If you want to know how to do that, you have but to ask.
It’s my job to get you the work tools you need and the opportunity and time to use them — that’s really the hardest part, getting the time. It starts with the 5-Minutes a Day Guitar Practice and goes forward from there.
How does your Kiosk work?
Your Pegboard will attract, and they’re fun to shop, but the Littleton albums provide a legitimacy to the already familiar coins, and give you some talking points, and orientation of the coin to the time period, which also gives you a good idea of how likely you are to find another high-grade like it — the further back in time, the longer it will take.
Still, you can’t charge more for the scarcer coin — the public won’t get it, just won’t.
You’ll have to sort of work in the difference, let the overall production carry the harder coins to find, or when pressed — ask for help.
You’ve got a TEAM behind you, a POG, of Coinology and LRS Practitioners, all ready to help when you put out the call.
What kind of help?
Well, everything from a few suggestions to sending you the coins you need or telling you how to get them quickly enough to cover your sale.
So long as these coins are in circulation, you should have no problem finding any of them — they are produced by the dozens every single day, which is hundreds every week, so don’t worry — there’s not going to be any shortage of quarters.
Of course, if the government stops making them, you’ll have the only quarter store in town — you might operate as a local bank in times of dismal emergency and desolation, but I digress.
Don’t forget, you’re selling the pendant at $39.95 each, and the earrings at $69.95 a pair. You can carry other items, too, but start small, start small.
The games are easy prices as well — the Tic-Tac-Toe single set sells for $89.95, but so does the double 3-T set, the checker set and the backgammon set all sell for the same low, low price of only $89.95, and you get a cash-back of a whole bingy-bongy bunch of quarters, and those ARE money!!!
Your customer is getting cash-money back. Make that point and make it stick. The customer has to realize that they are getting actual money back in the deal.
Another talking point with the games is that the coins are high-grade, very high grade, and that in the capsules, they are fully protected against oxidation, wear and environmental damage such as scratches, dents and stains.
You should have a handful of ordinary quarters to show how they normally show up on the workbench.
Part of your job is to make the customer aware of the process of coin search, and to open the possibility that they can do their own searches.
It doesn’t really matter what the customer’s initial goal might be, or their purpose or rationale. In short, motive is unimportant at this early stage, and greed is okay to start with, if that’s what it takes to get them started on the search.
Coin Safaris, where your Coinology Club gets together and searches and swaps and suggests and helps, are a big plus and a great social occasion.
You can organize the club’s coin-swap meets and co-ordinate them with a student sale or some event like a lecture or display or both.
CATCH O’ THE DAY
I have a coin featured every single day, and you can do the same, either with a blowup photo or on the screen of a counter-top or hand-held mobile device.
If you manage to sell three items a day, you’re in the money — just a little more effort and you’ll be self-supporting, and that’s the goal, to get you out from under the “You’re Fired!” range of a boss who might toss you under the bus when the going gets tough.
Don’t forget, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping!”.
The reason Coinology works is because it’s based on “SEE THE COIN” — something which is not easy to get another to do.
Try it, see what I mean.
Get someone to actually look through just ONE coin folder, just one. You’ll get it in an instant.
Okay, so how can you make someone look at 210 coins in five different folders?
Clearly, you can’t. They don’t have the time, even if they’ve got nothing else to do that day, they just don’t have the time.
One of the things that’s working to make Coinology work is that it requires a LOT of patience from YOU, the searcher.
Finding high-grade coins among the crud is your Objective Job. Pulling them offline and getting them jobs with the public, where they work as pendants, earrings or some other artistic or crafty application of the artisan’s skills.
How can you bridge the gap?
There are 210 beautiful coins. There is the customer, looking past them at nothing in particular, mind wandering, attention at a low level of interest, which translates to no attention whatever, just a massive bundle of potential reactions which lie at rest unless environmentally provoked.
Or mentally provoked. That can happen, too.
So how can you get the customer to actually L@@K at a coin??? The thing is simple as can be — make the coin an object of desire, but how???
If the coin were more valuable than the price, you might make a point, but you’d have to fix it so the customer can sell it right away, just by turning around, to someone else, for a much higher, even absurdly higher, price than they paid for it.
That’s the basic game out there, like it or not, but you don’t have to play it.
You can choose to take the high road, which means fewer sales but happier people with the right merchandise, the stuff that was meant to go to them, to serve in their lifestreams, to bring the Teaching to base areas, red zones, as it were, apolitically speaking, of aesthetic — a place in which elegance is unexpected.
First thing you’ll notice is that you can’t just thrust a coin folder into someone’s hands and expect them to carefully inspect every single coin in there.
Fact is, they won’t even look at the book, let alone the coin.
You won’t be able to get anyone to look at a quarter unless you appeal to their basic instincts, which you might not want to do, so here’s another approach:
You ask, “Are you local?” and if the answer is no, find out where they live and where they were raised, so you can find the right coins to show them, which you can explain as the reason you want that information.
Okay, you can also ask them the time and date of birth, to get the rising sign and moon, if you want to take those into consideration.
Once you’ve got some sort of connection for your customer — a favorite sport, a favorite place, a favorite historic point — you should know your stock enough to come up with a suggestion for a personally relevant coin they might like to wear, and there are plenty from which to choose.
You’ll also find subjects like “Civil War” and “Revolutionary War” represented in these U.S. pictorial quarters, plus people in history such as Helen Keller, Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Duke Ellington.
You’ll find what I call “The Nashville Coin”, which features musical instruments such as those you’d likely find at the world-famous “Grand Old Opry” in the country music capital of the world.
You’ll find fowl play aplenty, with water birds and many other types of modern dinosaurs, plus at least three coins that feature so-called “buffalo” that are actually American Bison, celebrating the massacre of the species.
There’s a wonderful choo-choo train coin that features two steamers and a golden spike, and you’ll find bunches of National Parks represented beautifully on these American quarters.
That’s the thing that is MOST likely to help you sell them — people already know about them, and they’re vaguely familiar with them, since they carry them around with them almost all the time, at least as familiar with the coins as they are with anything else they carry around with them, which explains why so many people lose their wallets, keys or glasses.
If you’re one of them, the secret is to have a special place for them and that’s the ONLY place they get put down, so they’re always in the same place when you go looking.
Much better than asking someone who knows even less about it than you do.
So how to get the customer to decide on a coin design?
They won’t. They don’t. They can’t.
You’ll have to decide for them, but how???
Simplest way is to ask them where they live, and find a coin that relates to their location — if not, you’ll have to go on questioning until you hit on something for which you happen to have a quarter.
In short, as they say in the playing card department, “Go fish!”.
In the end, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
See You At The Top!!!
gorby