Kennedy nears sellout
No complaints, but no sellout as the hours ticked by Sept. 16 following the Mint’s placement of the John F. Kennedy Coin and Chronicles Set on sale at noon Eastern…
No complaints, but no sellout as the hours ticked by Sept. 16 following the Mint’s placement of the John F. Kennedy Coin and Chronicles Set on sale at noon Eastern Daylight time on that date.
At 4:50 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time the Mint said it had sold 44,563 of the sets.
How long it would take buyers to claim all 50,000 sets was on the minds of many collectors.
On the morning of Sept. 17, the Mint website had labeled its set offer as limited and on back order with sets becoming available Sept. 28.
The Mint began shipping 25,000 of the sets right away.
By coincidence, this is the number of sets ordered in the first 10 minutes. In the first hour, 40,000 were taken by buyers.
Buyers used the new Mint mobile app to acquire 16 percent of the sets. Desktop computers claimed 78 percent and social media took 6 percent. These percentages apply only to online orders.
The number of telephone orders was not tallied by press time. However, the Mint had 147 customer service representatives at its contractor to take the calls.
This is the third Coin and Chronicles set to include a reverse proof Presidential dollar.
The Harry Truman set sold out in 15 minutes June 30, prompting the Mint to issue a statement the next day explaining why there were only 17,000 available.
Mint website problems plagued the Aug. 11 offering of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Coin and Chronicles Set and it also sold out in minutes. It had the same 17,000 mintage, but the Mint had reduced the household order limit from 5 sets to 2.
For the Kennedy set, the order limit stayed at 2 sets per household, but the mintage was nearly tripled to 50,000 sets.
After just over 20 minutes, the Kennedy set went on back order, but sales continued. According to the Mint website the expected in-stock date for those coins was Oct. 15.
The fourth Coin and Chronicles set of 2015, which will honor Lyndon Johnson, will go on sale Oct. 27 with a maximum mintage of 25,000.
This article was originally printed in Numismatic News.
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