The US Mint is running television ads promoting thier commemorative coin collections.  The ads depict various ordinary people in ordinary situations acting strangely because they are numismatists (coin collectors).  There is a woman who is fishing through the penny tray next to her convenience store cash register, there is a man with a metal detector in his bedroom and a long-distance runner who stops and sits down on the race path mid-marathon all because they are inspecting coins they have run across.

First of all, these are not the type of people who want to “collect” coins they ordered from a catalogue.  That’s not collecting, that’s shopping.  The mint should be honest with themselves and admit that their target for these ads is the well-intentioned aunt/uncle/grandparent/neighbor/family-friend who is looking for a graduation/birthday/congratulations gift for little Timmy or Sarah.

More importantly, though, is the slogan emblazoned on the screen and read aloud for the blind at the end of the commercials.  “Genuinely Worthwhile”  Does this refer to coin collecting, or the US Mint as a whole?  Is this a desperate attempt on the part of our government to make a push at catching back up with the Euro?  Would stimulating the coin collecting industry really bolster the value of the dollar all that much?  Am I reading too much into this?  Probably.  The mint just wants to sell pre-collected coin collections to unsuspecting doofuses who are either dumb enough not to realize that the fun of collecting things is the colleting and not the actual possesion, or are lazy enough to want to have a collection without having to go to the trouble of collecting anything.

Thank You for your time.  This has been Genuinely Worthwhile.

P.S. The Dog has a halloween costume.  He will be a lobster.  Both he and I are thoroughly pissed.

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