The question is: Why do the slabbing companies want to slab casino chips?

Here is my take on the answer to this question.

The slabbing companies do not care about the chip collecting hobby or any other hobby for that matter. The slabbing companies are COMPANIES that are in business to make money. I fault no one for being in business to provide some product or service that others are willing to pay for. I am not against businesses making money.

The slabbing companies started with the coin hobby, because there was a need for their services, as I pointed out in my article. But, there are only so many coins to slab, and eventually the business was drying up. So the slabbing companies had to think of ways to expand their markets. Unfortunately, the slabbing companies choose to expand the market in directions that opposed the interests of the hobbies they were serving.

In the coin collecting hobby, they started to slab newly released coins in high grades and created an artificial market that is doomed to collapse. Most knowledgeable coin collectors would never touch a recently issued high grade coin in a slab. But investors and newbies don't understand the dynamics of the market and eat them up, only to get heartburn later. A coin that is not rare today, will never be rare, no matter how long it is held. It will always be a common coin, regardless of condition, and will never be worth much more than face value.

The slabbing companies then started to slab baseball cards. There were several contributing factors to the collapse of the sports card collecting hobby, but slabbing was one of the major contributors. I recently saw that over 90% of the sports card stores have closed up in the last 10 years. And the ones that are still open have a basement full of, for the most part, worthless cards. Card collectors never had a real need for slabbing, it was the slabbing companies pushing their way into the hobby just to make money.

If the slabbing companies were truly interested in providing a valuable service to chip collectors, they would have consulted with the hobby to find out what the hobby needs. They did not. Instead the slabbing companies, just started slabbing casino chips. They never made an attempt to understand what the hobby needed and were never able to provide a service that the hobby needs. I am afraid that the threat of counterfeits and alterations may give the slabbers an opportunity to break into the chip collecting hobby. But, until they are able to demonstrate that they understand what the hobby needs and are going to provide a service that is valuable to the hobby, I will have absolutely nothing to do with them.