You certainly do understand it correctly, Tom, and that is one of the good things about enrollments, or subscriptions as they more commonly seem to be called now by the Mint. It’s great to have shipments sent for free, and not having to accrue three of those before the gratis shipping kicks in is a bonus. Additionally, those initial orders shipped for free also happen to fulfill the standard requirement for getting no charge shipping on all the rest of that year’s orders. This is without a doubt a heck of a win win situation!

I see that you noticed how important the low Household Order Limits really are to being able to acquire something, most especially so regarding any product that typically experiences high demand. 3 is certainly a good HOL, but when it comes to the most desirable of the Mint’s products, an HOL of 1 is clearly even more preferable.

If I understand things correctly, the other plus of the enrollments, if that is all you get, is no shipping charge, unlike the “order 3 items during the year” and after that the shipping is free. Since you are limited to 3 of the Morgan dollars, that household limit seems to work, as there are still plenty available, but seem to be going fast.
For those of us who jumped on the 3 roll set of women’s quarters, that was limited to 1 per household under the enrollment method, so I do think the limit does help. Those lasted a few weeks.

Sorry, Douglas, about my prior knee-jerk response to your very valid point. A better answer is that it may often seem that even on the best of days it is not at all unusual for the US Mint to find one way or another to either purposely or incidentally discover some way to favor its big buyers over the little guy.

You certainly hit the bullseye with your clear and concise yet complete answer, Tom; thanks on behalf of everyone here for that most valuable “tutorial”.

The only codicil I would insert is regarding the negative result of the occasions the Mint waives responsibility by assigning a far too high Household Order Limit to any particular item, in which case the great majority of the available inventory once again ends up in the hands of major dealers, large buying clubs and big flippers.

At the moment it is still possible to subscribe to the Morgan / Peace dollars in proof or uncirculated. I can’t speak for other issues since I am not interested, though a quick look indicates the 2023 unc silver eagle is available. go to the mint website and under shop/coins you can subscribe. You do not have to order those items quickly at the moment they are released. There is no excuse if you really want up to 3 Morgan/Peace dollars. The mint actually changed the system for ordering those coins and in my opinion made it tons easier to obtain them without fighting the big guys.

Unfortunately, Douglas, the US Mint is part of the US Government, and if there’s one thing both organizations know how to do it is to take much and give back little.

sam I am tweedy, greetings and salutations!

methinks thou hast spoken thine razor sharpe opinion, forsooth!

Tom,

I’ve been given to understand that the “data-available” amount is in fact the number still to be had overall. This, it seems, is why many items exhausted their entire inventory this year by subscription alone.

I don’t know of any specific quantities of a product being held in reserve that are not subject to subscription, nor does the Mint appear to offer any guarantee of availability on official coin release days.