These days, when I use the phrase “PLS”, I’m generally asking someone to DO something about something — for instance, a pictorial coin.
“PLS that!” means to actively pursue the coin’s symbolism through the mechanism of PLS inquiry — “What do you see?”, “What do you know?” and “Tell me the story”, all of which are of course the standard PLS technique.
On the off-chance that you don’t know about PLS, it refers to a past-life memory restoration technique called a “Past Life Survey”, and we’ll talk more about this later on as we get deeper and deeper into Coinology.
My concept for a Coinology Booth or Kiosk is very, very simple, and I’d tend to keep it simple.
There’s a mannequin bust on a tabletop, where you’ll also see a flat glass-topped display case, next to which will be a standing framed Pegboard.
I myself would tend to put the frame into a fancy portable painting easel, and lock it down in there with the crossbar, thus allowing easy access.
With a firmly placed Pegboard, the customer can feel free to just yank the thing off the hook without worrying about dumping the whole mess onto the floor for a horrible game of “100 items pickup”.
I want my prices totally dummy-proof.
I’m not going to be there every day. My stuff’s gotta be priced so anyone can get it.
That means simple, easy to remember prices, almost disregarding the merchandise. On the low end, it might be unfair to the small buyer, but on the higher end, there’s a lot of stuff going out the door for very little profit, if any, except in the artwork, where the markup is a LOT higher.
By the way, if you sell any of my art or the artwork of any member of the Grass Valley Graphics Group, you DO get a commission, which will vary depending on the piece.
I have some paintings that cost me $1,000 or more to frame. Those are gigantic hall-sized paintings, architectural scale, and the 6″ wide carved hardwood frames were made to museum specs back in 1987 and 1988 for a New York gallery show.
So, okay, keep it simple, right?
Right.
Ten bucks is the number I have in mind for very very high-grade pictorial quarters — far less than the average of $50 for the same coin graded and slabbed, or is it slabbed & graded???
Same coin in a sterling silver bezel, $39.95.
Put two of those into sterling silver coin-edge bezel and you pay $69.95.
Exact same coin but in a fancy handmade rope-edge bezel, it’s gonna be $89.95. Double that order in a pair of sterling silver fancy bezel earrings and it comes out at a mere $139.95, and the whole set sells for just $189.95, a whale of a saving!
Speaking of whales, I have some legal ivory beads for sale in a necklace that also sports some Ashanti gold weights, on sale now at only $495.95, guaranteed authentic & rare, but forget about those things — they’re part of the “extras” you’ll want to place around your standard fare at standard prices.
So what else we got???
Okay, how about the same coin in a game? In that case, your customer is buying at least eight capsules, which certainly qualifies for a discount price!
The way I figure it, the set is $89.95 no matter what the hell it is — it can be an eight-piece tic-tac-toe set in a tongue & groove oaken playing box, or an 18-piece Double Tic-Tac-Toe set in a cardboard sales & shipping box, or a 24-piece set of Backgammon or Checkers, or a Collector’s Choice Set in your choice of fine presentation boxes, all for the low, low price of only $89.95.
Then there’s the 32-piece Chess Set and the 32-piece Memory Builder Set, either of which retails at $139.95.
On your 5-Minutes-a-Day guitar practice, not caring where your fingers fall will help you achieve a Great Satori, while worrying about fumbling and misplacing fingers will only throw you out of the meditative “zoning” state.
Judging the Mint States of the Quarters will be a similar experience. Just as guitar can be an active Moving Meditation, so also can sorting & searching.
Don’t neglect your nightly search. It prepares you for your morning obligations. When it’s a fair or selling day that you’re going into, there’s a NECESSITY brewing that makes your hunt a success, and DO think of it as hunting.
“Good Hunting” is the phrase with which we wave at parting from a Coinology Club meeting.
Every Saturday between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., you’ll find a gang of Mint-State Crazed Coin Hunters gathered around several tables at the gallery, peering downward at the tabletop, all of them muttering something inaudible and unguessable.
So here’s what happens when a customer walks up to your booth. They see a necklace and earrings on the mannequin bust.
They see the case with jewelry inside it.
They also see the Pegboard, and when their eyes light on it, that’s when you begin your pitch, which consists of nothing more than telling them what the game is.
“These coins all come free with our coin jewelry. Pick out any coin you like and I’ll mount it into your choice of pendant, earring, key ring or money clip.”
$10 bucks, $39.95, $69.95, $89.95, $139.95 and $189.95 are all the numbers you need to know, period.
You don’t even need to know the numbers on the coins, just the pretty pictures.
Of course, it helps immensely if you grasp that a coin has come down to you from fifteen years away, without scar and without harm.
This is in itself a minor miracle and should be duly recorded.
Get the idea of how this tiny shop works?
Keep in mind that it’s by no means limited to pictorial quarters. We’re talking about a whole concept here, and small-but-mighty is the force behind the concept.
With the pictorial quarters, you’re working with something that millions of people handle every single day, and with which most people believe — however wrongly — that they know something about their own pocket change, but of course they don’t.
That’s your edge, right there.
Knowing how to spot the Mint State coins and get rid of the rejects is your whole stock in trade — it’s what makes it possible to market a quarter for more than a quarter.
One thing you’ll have to do — it’s part of your Objective Job — is to demonstrate clearly to the customer’s complete understanding, exactly WHY that quarter is worth more than a quarter.
I wouldn’t want that job, but it’s the very same job I’ve had forever, and you can, too.
Yeah.
“So, what IS it about this quarter that makes it worth more than a quarter???”
Some folks will never know.
Some folks will fight you to Kingdom Come to avoid SEEING the coin, while LOOKING and complaining the whole time.
Don’t bother with those guys, they don’t need your intervention.
You’ll automatically find those who can SEE the coin and who understand and appreciate why it SHOULD be more than a quarter.
For one thing, you’ve sunk $10 bucks cold cash into the coin by wrapping it in a bezel, so now it’s worth at LEAST $10.25, including the quarter, and that’s just your COST, so you’ll have to mark it up to retail.
Retail on a PERFECT coin in a coin-edged simple sterling silver bezel with the extra-large bail loop would be $39.95, and worth every penny.
There’s some more room in the price if you ever want to go “jewelry store retail”, which I don’t suggest in today’s zany and unpredictable marketplace.
The other reasons you marked the coin up are that you spent time searching, spent time and money obtaining the coins from the bank, which isn’t that easy if you go every day looking for new coins to search through, and of course, your expert eye.
It’s that expert eye that tells you that the coin is gradable, and that’s what determines the value, in the end.
You’ll put a very very fine coin in an acrylic capsule. No Further Damage is the byword here. If it’s just a little teensy weensy under that High-Energy coin level, it’s great for mounting in a sterling silver or 14k gold bezel, and the cost is incredibly low for your customer, because you’re doing all your searching yourself.
Not having to pay that extra money for coins is worth the effort.
You’ll come across your fair share of Mint Error coins as you search for Clean Coins.
That is in point of fact what your search is all about — Clean Coins.
It’s a Money Laundry, in the sense that you’re wading through dirty coins sort of dumpster-diving fashion, looking for those incredible high-mint coins that happened by chance to avoid catastrophe, right down to the smallest scratch, smudge or smear.
Perfect Coins abound, but who sees them?
To the average public, a coin is a coin is a coin, meaning “There ain’t no quarters in there any different than any other quarter.”.
This is, of course, ridiculous.
No two quarters are EXACTLY alike, but even if they were, they vary greatly — some would say astronomically — from their sister counterparts, the dirty money left in the hand or on the velvet pad after the high-grade coins have been extracted.
You’re saving souls by extracting them from the Wheel of Circulation, and don’t you forget it. Just internalizing “Om Mani Padme Hum” turns on the Soul Search Effect, thus automatically and remotely fulfilling your Bodhisattva Vow.
You can do this in your jammies or skivvies right there in the comfort and security of your own home, or you can head into an office or workspace and perform your coinly tasks there.
Think of your job in the marketplace as that of a guide, bringing a client from the place of “It’s just a coin” all the way to a Flash of Deep Enlightenment.
Well, maybe that’s a bit premature, just a tad over-confident.
How about traversing the distance between “It’s just a coin”, all the way to “It’s just a quarter”???
I know, it doesn’t seem like much of an intuitive Leap of Faith, but it might be all you can wring out of some wretched soul wandering in the Bardo, Lost in Space and Time and Out of Energy.
That’s too bad — without energy, not much can be done, and you’re no Superhero.
Luckily, I am.
A source of energy, not a superhero. I don’t leap over anything, especially tall buildings. I walk around them, or through them if they have a revolving door on both street entrances.
That’d be your average New York City department store.
I don’t want to give the impression I only shopped at Macy’s, because I didn’t. I also shopped at Bergdorf-Goodman’s, Maxime’s and of course Hammacher-Schlemmer’s, when I worked there as Roving Floor Manager in 1959.
It was that experience that gave me the idea for the Deluxe Memory Builder — I can see it going into their catalog as a unique item carried only by Hammacher-Schlemmer’s, which is their preference, as whose wouldn’t be???
I know what you’re thinking.
Huh?
But “Huh?” doesn’t get the idea across very well, does it?
So you’ll have to rely on luck, intelligence and the waking state to help you guide your client through the untrackable jungle of mind-sets, all the way from “Go away, what do you want from me?” to “Thanks so much, I’ll be back for more things from your store when I get more money!”.
This is a rare gift.
Actually, both things are a rare gift — knowing how to guide a client through the rough parts, and also actually taking the time and trouble to do so.
Education is what it’s all about.
Educating the Soul is a job that takes many lifetimes, and requires a willing subject who is able and willing to learn through personal experience and repetition.
Both of those things are hard to take if you’re a robot.
Robots don’t relate to anything resembling hard work, while the Essential Self relishes it and seeks challenge without boredom.
That’s a tough combination to achieve, but you’ll have to get there before you get any good at Coinology, and you can add a touch of compassion and empathy to that mix, too.
Sure, you’re selling product, but you’re also introducing some people — not many, but some — to the daily spiritual practice we call “Coin Search”, and they will be grateful for the turn-on that YOU provided with your Coinology Kiosk or Fair Booth.
The social aspect is the Coin Search & Swap Circle, plus the weekend seminars and coin shows that your local club might want to host.
Once again, note the relationship between the raw coins — those in “Gorby’s Money Laundry” packets — and the finished craft or jewelry product that uses the clean coin.
Sure, “Money Laundry” is a hot and loaded subject these days, but as someone who has no voice, I want to at least weigh in on the matter with my raw and uncensored humor, hence “Money Laundry” in relation to Donald J. Trump’s general business practices.
Of course, I don’t include his extra income side-job, which is to betray Democracy, for which he gets paid plenty by his owner, Raz Putin, through Oligarchs and Cutouts.
Boy, talk about the Deep State — that refers of course to the Cloud of Unknowing that hangs in the President’s pathetic little pea-brain.
He has a measurable I.Q. of 45, and I can prove it.
His Free Facebook Personality Profile Test has been published under the title “Real Fake News” on a Hidden Dark Web site that is so secret I can’t even type it here on this blog, let alone, put in a hot-link to the secret site.
When a secret becomes known, it can no longer be referred to as a secret.
One secret that you can penetrate is that of deep meditation, and the fastest way I know to achieve that state is to perform a successful and correct coin search of the quarter kind.
Different searches force different results.
A dime search is good for prayer or petitions. The penny search is good for attention and presence, plus peace and prosperity. The half dollar search is too expensive for me to try, and the dollar search is totally out of the question.
Hey, be content with powerful success and unlimited personal wealth and freedom, which is the primary result of Coinology when properly applied.
In the end, you should be able to open passageways, doorways, portals and stargates, and to offer energy and help to those suffering souls who can and should be awake and alive.
Your intervention can be of inestimable value to all beings everywhere. Won’t you take a few moments a day to help?
You can find out exactly what to do and how to do it, just by asking for help.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby