An open letter in response to the U.S. Mint

by Michael S. Turrini

Dear Mr. Landry of the U.S. Mint,

Your form mass-mailed letter of April 30, 2019 requested participation, voluntary and secure, in a survey to “improve the products and services” offered by the United States Mint, a most noble and important effort.

I applied my assigned User Name and Password to begin the survey, only to be rejected with the first question asking if I had purchased United States Mint products in the past twelve months. My honest answer was NO. Thus, I was not qualified for this survey.

Not qualified for this survey? An active and avid coin hobbyist since 1965 and an enthused and enlightened hobby advocate since the early 1970s plus once a regular purchaser from the United States Mint since the 1970s, evenback in the days that we coin hobbyists might remember: “limit of five Proof Sets per purchaser (or address?)”

Mr. Landry, maybe the negative answer should have directed me immediately to this question: ‘why have you not purchased in the past twelve months?’ Would not my responses (responses possibly echoed and chorused by many others) be informative and assist in explaining why the world’s largest coin dealer, the United States Mint, has lost customers consistently this past decade or so?

Mr. Landry, contracting and hiring an outside research firm and then directing inquiries to those who purchase regularly or recently overlooks and actually dismisses thousands of coin hobbyists and others who have ‘walked away’ from the world’s largest coin dealer, the United States Mint.

Your professional online sophisticated survey rejects and refuses to acknowledge those who have quite candid and negative opinions and observations as to the world’s largest coin dealer, the United States Mint.

Mr. Landry, you and the United States Mint need to talk to, converse with, and listen to the ‘grass roots’, ‘the trenches’, of our hobby, not the suit and tie elites at an American Numismatic Association or similar national assemblages. It is those out there across and around our great nation that have shut the door to anything, or most anything the United States Mint might offer.

In closing, I know my response here shall be rejected; yet, I remind you Mr. Landry, that rejection is the attitude and answer by many thousands of coin hobbyists as myself about the world’s largest coin dealer, the United States Mint.