So, the Zcoins still haven't been finalized... but the Census did go up by about 9 coins today, all mint state, and 8 of those line up with the 8 pre-hyperinflation coins in my submission… So I may have just gotten a sneak peek at some of my grades… and the grades are pretty consistent with what I would have expected from those coins… but no way to know for sure.
But, while I can’t talk grades officially yet, I have little better or more interesting to do with my socially-isolated, work-from-home, life… so I’m going to “treat” everyone to more of my scientific wild-### speculation… You’re welcome. Straight into my "Random nonsense" category with this one.
I've had some on-side discussions with Mike about the idea of how easy or hard it would be and how well it might actually work out in practice to de-bottleneck the back end of the process by adding people to do minor work / tasks... but I do wonder if there could be another issue at play.
I was wondering the other day, how many machines does NGC have for sonically sealing the slabs? How quickly can they be loaded? How long does it take per coin to encapsulate, even if you're well practiced? What is the theoretical upper limit on the number of coins NGC can encapsulate a day without buying more machines? I’m guessing those things are not cheap and if they actually hit the upper limit of their capacity for a while it wouldn’t necessarily be a trivial choice or task to get more and bring them online.
Of course, the other thing I've wondered about at times... with 2021s supply chain issues I've wondered where they source slab parts from and how well they've been able to keep slab parts and inserts of various sizes on inventory... My local Walmart can’t even keep generic sodas in stock consistently the last few months so it does make me wonder where NGC gets their parts from and what kind of susceptibility they have to vender supply interruptions…
But the bump up in the census today has me really wondering about another wrinkle I hadn’t considered at all up to this point: The census itself.
Several of the coins I submitted in my Z coin submission were the first ones like that that NGC has ever graded, so adding those coins to the Census also probably involves building out the database on the back end to add rows / categories for those coins to go into. If NGC is getting a larger than normal in-flow of World coins, it could also be that they are getting a much higher than usual number of coins that are the first-of-their-kind-graded-by-NGC. If that’s happening that could easily cause a bottleneck / slow things down considerably because I’m sure that’s not something NGC would just hire someone off the street to work on. I’m sure the accuracy and integrity of the census or the underlying database is something they take really seriously.
Something like this would probably also explain why this would hit world coins so hard while not impacting the US coins at all. Except for new 2021 / current year issues I’m sure there’s almost nothing under the sun in American coins that NGC has not graded a thousand times over (assuming there are that many in existence). So, there wouldn’t be much need to expand / build upon the underlying database for US coins, but I’m sure there is a UNIVERSE of world coins out there that NGC has never graded before and I’m sure they’re encountering new ones with increasing frequency with their efforts to expand beyond the US…
I know from emailing customer service that my coins were probably graded 1.5 to 2 weeks ago, if not more… but the Census bumped up today / this week…
It gets even more interesting in this context that the update to the Zimbabwe census today may include all of my coins except the bond coins… That this update would include coins that are just new dates for things they have graded before but not the bond coins which they maybe be planning on entering into the census in a different way…
Of course, I don’t know… and will probably never know… because NGC customer service is very tight-lipped. I mean EXTREMELY tight lipped. But I REALLY am starting to think I’m on to something with this one…
As of today, World Modern turnaround times are up again to 93 working days... I'm wondering if they'll hit 100.
10 Comments
Recommended Comments
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now