>>The bottom line is if you don't like the price, don't buy the product. If you think you're doing your fellow collectors a favor my alerting them to a price that you think is to high, you're wrong. All your doing is alerting them to another auction. Let each person determine what they feel is a fair price.

Ralph, you are oversimplifying the issue.

When one casino stopped extending special priviledges to new issue providers all we heard was how this practice was going to hurt collectors who rely on new issue service providers and that in order for us to be able to get the new issues we should not support casino policies which do not grant these special priviledges.

That is all well and good when the new issue providers (like many of them do) actually make the chips they got from their special priviledges availbale to collectors at reasonable prices.

But I see no difference bewteen a casino holding aside chips or tokens for someone so that they can sell them at a 550% markup and a casino executive designing chips and buying the whole issue and selling them at a marked up price.

That isn't to say that there is anything wrong with someone selling a chip or token for as much as they can get. But as a collector I certainly am not going to encourage casinos to make special reserved lists for new issue providers when the new issue provider is taking advantage of the priviledge to gouge me.

I have already cut my LE purchase to almost 0 (I still purchase for an offline friend). In light of how the casinos have been handling LE's I have lost interest in them.