There was a time when the mint would sell coins and bills at face value. The problem is, people started using that for manufactured spending to rack up credit card points. They added a premium to prevent this.
I'm familiar with the concept of manufactured spend, and why credit card companies would try to clamp down on it. What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies. The usual way to eliminate manufactured spend would be to add a credit card specific transaction fee that cancels out the spend points. By the Mint increasing the base price for everybody, this affects even people who might be paying with a debit card, or an ACH transaction (not sure if they're options, just positing).
Before 2013, this likely would have violated their credit card processing agreement.
And also, it would be illegal in some states.
Going though that same effort is a waste of time and implementation budget for something like selling novelty bills.
I agree with you, it is well known that these collector products are intended to generate revenue.
Also, they literally have their pricing rationale in their FAQs:
https://www.usmint.gov/help-center/most-popular-questions.ht...
> We cannot use any tax dollars to fund our numismatic operations.
> The United States Mint’s numismatic programs are self-sustaining and operate at no cost to the taxpayer. Any excess funds are returned to the Treasury General Fund to reduce the annual budget deficit of the federal government.
Hard to say what their reasoning is. It could be pressure from the credit card companies. Or it could be that someone at the mint decided they don't like the idea of people gaming the system.
At the end of the day, it's not a positive-value economic activity. And if enough folks started buying coins for face value just to churn credit card points, there would be financial losses for the mint/and-or the credit card company.
The specific US version was an attempt to bootstrap acceptance of the $1 coin-- if you could get a box of 500 shipped to your door, you'd spend them and eventually they'd displace $1 notes. When they went straight back to the bank, no circulation occurred, and they were burning merchant fees and shipping costs for nothing.
Some other countries used "selling coins at face value" as an explicit financial hack based on seignorage (the value of a coin in excess of its buillion content).
Canada used to sell commemorative $20 (and then on to $50, 100, and possibly $200) coins with modest silver content based on this model.
If someone pays $20 for $10 worth of silver, the government profits $10-- as long as the coin disappears into a collector's binder and never enters circulation.
So it worked fine as long as collectors bought them. When people bought them to generate card points, and immediately took them to the bank to exchange for more conventional currency, the plan fell apart, and Canada abandoned the programme.
The UK flavour had a particularly ugly endgame-- the mint basically told banks not to accept them as deposits (https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-3390519/I-b...) which did nothing positive for the programme's long-term survival.
It's a shame these programmes were sabotaged and died. The idea of "instead of stuffing a banknote or gift card in an envelope, I can give you a pretty collectible and feel confident that if one day you need the money bad enough, you can still spend it" was a nice idea while it lasted.