Colour 50p’s – Royal Mint’s Special Can of Worms

 Once upon a time, a crafty coin minting place decided to step things up.  They had seen how much more dollar could be made by creating new product lines and they decided to go even further down this route……

In 2016, The Royal Mint launched the UKs first colour fifty pence silver proofs.  Since this time they have continued to do this with select coins in this denomination – usually child-orientated or cutesy-cutesy ones (but don’t you go saying anything about this being woefully predictable because that would be entirely unfair lol)..

The colour silver fifty pences dramatically increased profits over in Llantrisant.  The big-wigs there were very jolly excited about this and proceeded to have big long and hard thinking sessions about how to step things up even further.  Surely there must be another gap in the market…..

It was around this time that some brainbox came up with the idea of colour bunc coins.  After all, not every collector could afford to buy silver proofs and until that time, this was the only way of obtaining a colour version of a fifty pence (unless of course you were to purchase some of those proper dodgy decals from eBay and you were prepared to coat your precious coins in adhesive/crap and inferior looking stickers).

EUREKA!!!!  Yes!  The Royal Mint had come up with a real barnstormer of an idea once again.  And it was an idea that could be used again and again and again to make money (quite a lot like the Beatrix Potter idea you understand but – The Royal Mint are pretty good at milking things until the udders are sore).

And so all over the country, collectors were suddenly forced into a terrible predicament.  For many new coins that were (and still are) released were (and still are) in two different versions: normal cupro-nickel and cupro-nickel with colour printing on the top.  Oer missus!!

 

‘The Royal Mint are pretty good at milking things until the udders are sore).’

 

I am pretty sure that our friends at RM had thought about all of this in advance…… and when they had they would have been fully aware that many collectors would feel so torn about which coins to buy that they would end up purchasing BOTH versions.  But that outcome was perfectly okay as it would result in even more sales!

So, to summarise – creating what is essentially the ‘poor man’s silver proof’ by creating a sub-currency somewhere in-between bunc fifty pences and silver ones, The Royal Mint have generated not only more lovely lolly for themselves, but a whole lot of derision and division in the coin collecting community as a whole.

Well done RM!!!  Three cheers everyone!  😀

 

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