Completeness factor slow to work?

The second America the Beautiful quarter of 2013 is now available in quantity from the U.S. Mint.

Have you ordered your rolls or bags yet?

The coin honors Perry’s Victory and International Peace Monument at the village of Put-In-Bay, Ohio, but today I am less interested in the theme than in collector ordering patterns.

Collectors were given a new purchase option with this year’s uncirculated quarters. They can buy a three-roll set that includes one roll each from the Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco Mints.

It is a useful option for any collector who wants a complete roll set in one fell swoop.

However, as with the first design of 2013, collector purchases of the two-roll “P” And “D” set continue to outnumber the purchases of the three-roll set.

Why is that?

I would think a two-roll set when completeness is defined as a three-roll set would wither away quickly, but it does not seem to be doing so.

Buyers have taken 10,676 of the two-roll sets compared to 4,290 of the three-roll sets for the Perry coin.

You can also buy just the San Francisco roll individually and 3,208 of these have been sold.

I guess that means that if you assume that all of the purchasers of the individual San Francisco roll had purchased a two-roll “P” and “D” set, you would still have 7,468 two-roll sets waiting for the “S” roll to be added.

Perhaps the buyers of the two-roll set do not know of the three-roll option yet, or even that they do not know “S” rolls exists at all, but nearly 10 months after the “S” coins were introduced, that seems somewhat difficult to believe.

At some point you would think that the three-roll set will become the most popular option, or I will have to revise my view of the overall popularity of the “S” uncirculated quarters.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."