hotel coin buyers

e wrote:
In article , Edwin Johnston wrote:


James Higby wrote:

"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...


stonej wrote:


It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


Morality is about religion. Businesses aren't about religion.
Now, ethical is another question.


Your statement sent me to two dictionaries. The American Heritage
Dictionary, 4th edition (current) makes no mention of religion whatsoever
under the rubric of moral. It offers ethical, virtuous, and righteous as
synonyms, and mentioned the religious aspect somewhat obliquely in its
discussion of righteous. The Mirriam-Webster 3rd International Unabridged
(current) listed the same synonyms and added noble to the mix. The
religions aspect was mentioned, but only after a half-column of very tiny
print.

James



Heh! Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals ....


any incorporated religion or church.

Thanx for making my point.

"... instead of being tax-free, churches should be taxed double. They
should be taxed right out of existence."
~ Wm. S. Burroughs, Jr., "Sects and Death", 1979

Bruce Remick wrote:
"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...

James Higby wrote:

"stonej" wrote in message
egroups.com...


It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


I always get in trouble for doing this, but, oh, what the Heck...let me up
the ante.

Suppose that the hotel buyer buys a hand-me-down collection for a thousand
dollars. He turns it for $2000. That buyer in turn sells it for $3000.
The new owner flips it at $4000. It walks into a shop and gets purchased
for $5000. I walk into the shop and buy it for $6000, its retail value
according to the "book." The next morning I offer the collection to a
client of mine and sell it to him for $7000. Figuring that he got the best
of me to the tune of about a grand, he heads for the hotel the next
morning... Seven different people have made $1000 each on the collection.
An eighth anticipates doing likewise. Your mission, should you decide to
accept it: Identify the moral individuals in this scenario.

James



Are you having the new Pope or the head Rabbi or Ayatolla decide this?
Not morality -- ethics!


This all sounds like simple capitalism to me. As long as there are satisfied
buyers and sellers, the process will go on, morality or ethics notwithstanding.
Many of those in the retail chain make their money this way.

Bruce


The black market and the Mafia run on simple capitalism too.

gogu wrote:
? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...

James Higby wrote:

"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...


stonej wrote:


It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


Morality is about religion. Businesses aren't about religion.
Now, ethical is another question.


Your statement sent me to two dictionaries. The American Heritage
Dictionary, 4th edition (current) makes no mention of religion whatsoever
under the rubric of moral. It offers ethical, virtuous, and righteous as
synonyms, and mentioned the religious aspect somewhat obliquely in its
discussion of righteous. The Mirriam-Webster 3rd International
Unabridged (current) listed the same synonyms and added noble to the mix.
The religions aspect was mentioned, but only after a half-column of very
tiny print.

James



Heh! Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals ....


???
Doctors, engineers, even lawyers :-)
Now if you ask me how many of them are following that code, well...


No, none of them follow codes of morals, professions establish codes of
ethics. "First do no harm" is an ethical, not a moral position.
And college philosophy departments don't offer Morals classes to
students, but do offer classes about Ethics.

Hotel coin buyers ads have huge price ranges, but the low end is often
about half melt for 90% silver (30 cent for dimes, 75 for quarters,
1.50 for halves, etc.) They probably flip it all the next day for 6X
Best Regards, Bob Johnson

Directories
--------------------------------------------------
GOLDSHEET Mining http://www.goldsheetlinks.com
COINSHEET Numismatic http://www.coinsheetlinks.com
OILSHEET Energy http://www.oilsheetlinks.com
--------------------------------------------------

"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...
Bruce Remick wrote:
"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...

James Higby wrote:

"stonej" wrote in message
egroups.com...


It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


I always get in trouble for doing this, but, oh, what the Heck...let me up
the ante.

Suppose that the hotel buyer buys a hand-me-down collection for a thousand
dollars. He turns it for $2000. That buyer in turn sells it for $3000.
The new owner flips it at $4000. It walks into a shop and gets purchased
for $5000. I walk into the shop and buy it for $6000, its retail value
according to the "book." The next morning I offer the collection to a
client of mine and sell it to him for $7000. Figuring that he got the best
of me to the tune of about a grand, he heads for the hotel the next
morning... Seven different people have made $1000 each on the collection.
An eighth anticipates doing likewise. Your mission, should you decide to
accept it: Identify the moral individuals in this scenario.

James



Are you having the new Pope or the head Rabbi or Ayatolla decide this?
Not morality -- ethics!


This all sounds like simple capitalism to me. As long as there are
satisfied
buyers and sellers, the process will go on, morality or ethics
notwithstanding.
Many of those in the retail chain make their money this way.

Bruce


The black market and the Mafia run on simple capitalism too.


You got it. There are plenty of examples.

Bruce
'just my two cents. Maybe you can turn it for four cents'

Is it limited to hotel buyers and pawn shops?

Didn't you start a thread a few weeks ago entitled "Customer Story. Would
Heritage really do this??" about a customer who has sent some coins to
Heritage and got a $500 offer on coins that you appraised at $2077.

Didn't Surperior Galleries pay $125 for a Proof 1866 "NO Motto" Half Dollar
a few years ago? The coin had been stolen from the Dupont Family a long
time before.

Several years ago, long before many of the current denizens of this group
had even heard of RCC, a woman posted here asking for an ethical dealer in
California. She said she had some coins that she had taken to a local
dealer who offered her $900 for them. It turned out that her father had
left her several coins after his death. He had been a coin dealer for 40
years or so and when he retired he kept some of the more interesting coins
from his inventory. Included in the coins she had taken to the dealer for
an offer were a complete GEM Panama Pacific Commemorative set including the
$50 gold piece (she didn't say whether it was round or octagonal) and a BU
1884-S Morgan dollar that her father had labeled "GEM - To die for". It
wasn't difficult to determine that the dealer's offer was a tad low. I
suggested a dealer in LA. She nixed that. Then I suggested she should sell
these at auction and recommended a firm in New Hampshire. I don't know
whether she followed my advice or not.

This is not to say that all or even most dealers are unethical. We know
from your postings that you are a highly ethical dealer. And, there are
several dealers I know to whom I can take my coins and predict within a few
dollars what I would get for them. And one can easily imagine that with
Heritage dealing mostly in high end slabbed coins, that it may take as much
time and effort to slab and sell a few common coins than it is worth to
them. And the Superior clerk who purchased the quarter may have just erred
in not knowing what he had. But there are dealers I know who are like the
dealer in the third story above. And these dealers are the ones who give
all of numismatics a bad name in the eye of some of the public.


--
Richard
My coin Links:
http://coins.richlh.com/Coins/MyCoinLinks.htm

"Wes Chormicle" wrote in message
k.net...
Somewhere "Intent" has to enter the equation. One thing we know for sure,
the hotel buyer isn't going to flip it for a quick small profit. Using
the senario of the 14 D Lincoln we sent down, he was going to buy it for
$440 and sell it to any number of reputable dealers for $2K plus.

The same thing happens at pawn shops. They buy as cheap as the hotel
guys.

Richard L. Hall wrote:
Is it limited to hotel buyers and pawn shops?

Didn't you start a thread a few weeks ago entitled "Customer Story. Would
Heritage really do this??" about a customer who has sent some coins to
Heritage and got a $500 offer on coins that you appraised at $2077.

Didn't Surperior Galleries pay $125 for a Proof 1866 "NO Motto" Half Dollar
a few years ago? The coin had been stolen from the Dupont Family a long
time before.

Several years ago, long before many of the current denizens of this group
had even heard of RCC, a woman posted here asking for an ethical dealer in
California. She said she had some coins that she had taken to a local
dealer who offered her $900 for them. It turned out that her father had
left her several coins after his death. He had been a coin dealer for 40
years or so and when he retired he kept some of the more interesting coins
from his inventory. Included in the coins she had taken to the dealer for
an offer were a complete GEM Panama Pacific Commemorative set including the
$50 gold piece (she didn't say whether it was round or octagonal) and a BU
1884-S Morgan dollar that her father had labeled "GEM - To die for". It
wasn't difficult to determine that the dealer's offer was a tad low. I
suggested a dealer in LA. She nixed that. Then I suggested she should sell
these at auction and recommended a firm in New Hampshire. I don't know
whether she followed my advice or not.

This is not to say that all or even most dealers are unethical. We know
from your postings that you are a highly ethical dealer. And, there are
several dealers I know to whom I can take my coins and predict within a few
dollars what I would get for them. And one can easily imagine that with
Heritage dealing mostly in high end slabbed coins, that it may take as much
time and effort to slab and sell a few common coins than it is worth to
them. And the Superior clerk who purchased the quarter may have just erred
in not knowing what he had. But there are dealers I know who are like the
dealer in the third story above. And these dealers are the ones who give
all of numismatics a bad name in the eye of some of the public.



This speaks to something I overheard at a coin show: that the business
was pretty narrow, by and large. There is the Greysheet and the small
percentages between buy and sell. It was small percentages, like 15%
here and there, to make a living. That's a far cry from the rhetoric
I've seen here about buying at $1,00 and flipping this and that until it
reaches $7,000.
Unethical is one word and I guess (since coin dealing is unregulated for
the most part); unscrupulous another similar term.

? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...
gogu wrote:
? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...

James Higby wrote:

"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...


stonej wrote:


It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


Morality is about religion. Businesses aren't about religion.
Now, ethical is another question.


Your statement sent me to two dictionaries. The American Heritage
Dictionary, 4th edition (current) makes no mention of religion
whatsoever under the rubric of moral. It offers ethical, virtuous, and
righteous as synonyms, and mentioned the religious aspect somewhat
obliquely in its discussion of righteous. The Mirriam-Webster 3rd
International Unabridged (current) listed the same synonyms and added
noble to the mix. The religions aspect was mentioned, but only after a
half-column of very tiny print.

James



Heh! Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals ....


???
Doctors, engineers, even lawyers :-)
Now if you ask me how many of them are following that code, well...


No, none of them follow codes of morals, professions establish codes of
ethics. "First do no harm" is an ethical, not a moral position.
And college philosophy departments don't offer Morals classes to students,
but do offer classes about Ethics.


You said "Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals", not "Show
me a business or profession where members do *FOLLOW* their Code of
Morals"...
Now if we talk semantics, we can discuss ad infinitum about the difference
of "moral" and "ethic" ;-)


rgrds


--

E' mai possibile, oh porco di un cane, che le avventure
in codesto reame debban risolversi tutte con grandi
puttane! F.d.A

Coins, travels and mo http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/golanule/my_photos
http://gogu.enosi.org/index.html
http://www.romclub.4t.com/rabin.html

gogu wrote:
? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...

gogu wrote:

? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...


James Higby wrote:


"Edwin Johnston" wrote in message
...



stonej wrote:



It's perfectly legal. Is it moral? I report, you decide.

Not moral. You asked and I decided.


Morality is about religion. Businesses aren't about religion.
Now, ethical is another question.


Your statement sent me to two dictionaries. The American Heritage
Dictionary, 4th edition (current) makes no mention of religion
whatsoever under the rubric of moral. It offers ethical, virtuous, and
righteous as synonyms, and mentioned the religious aspect somewhat
obliquely in its discussion of righteous. The Mirriam-Webster 3rd
International Unabridged (current) listed the same synonyms and added
noble to the mix. The religions aspect was mentioned, but only after a
half-column of very tiny print.

James




Heh! Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals ....



???
Doctors, engineers, even lawyers :-)
Now if you ask me how many of them are following that code, well...



No, none of them follow codes of morals, professions establish codes of
ethics. "First do no harm" is an ethical, not a moral position.
And college philosophy departments don't offer Morals classes to students,
but do offer classes about Ethics.



You said "Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals", not "Show
me a business or profession where members do *FOLLOW* their Code of
Morals"...
Now if we talk semantics, we can discuss ad infinitum about the difference
of "moral" and "ethic" ;-)


Or the difference between amoral and unethical.

? "Edwin Johnston" ?????? ??? ??????
...

Heh! Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals ....


???
Doctors, engineers, even lawyers :-)
Now if you ask me how many of them are following that code, well...


No, none of them follow codes of morals, professions establish codes of
ethics. "First do no harm" is an ethical, not a moral position.
And college philosophy departments don't offer Morals classes to
students,
but do offer classes about Ethics.


You said "Show me a business or profession with a Code of Morals", not
"Show
me a business or profession where members do *FOLLOW* their Code of
Morals"...
Now if we talk semantics, we can discuss ad infinitum about the
difference
of "moral" and "ethic" ;-)


Or the difference between amoral and unethical.

Right!

--

E' mai possibile, oh porco di un cane, che le avventure
in codesto reame debban risolversi tutte con grandi
puttane! F.d.A

Coins, travels and mo http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/golanule/my_photos
http://gogu.enosi.org/index.html
http://www.romclub.4t.com/rabin.html