"Ultimately, I think Gene hit the nail on the head when, wearing his gaming industry hat, he said, "We'll stop producing them when you stop collecting them!"

That may no longer be true.
The crossover market for chips like the Palms produces is just about equal to the chip collectors market. A certain amount of that crossover market will come into the chip collector catagory.

In early Dec I had an email from a NY non chip collector begging for a Jack Daniels chip that he had seen in a press release. The gentleman has since obtained as many different Palms chips that we could find and asked for information on how to obtain other casinos chips. This has happened many times in 3 years.