Glenn Sorgenstein started collecting coins in the 1960s when he was a child. His fascination with coins never ended, and since 1985 he’s owned Wilshire Coin Exchange, one of the city’s few coin-counting services. His company deals with individuals and banks, and handles any amount of coins that need to be counted. Over the years he has expanded his service to include foreign currency exchange and collectibles. Sorgenstein spoke to Jolie Gorchov about dealing in coins and collectibles.
We buy and sell virtually anything having to do with money: gold, silver, platinum, rare coins, foreign exchange and diamonds. We process regular coins for people off the street, but most of what we do is with banks.
Banks don’t handle coins anymore. If you take a Sparkletts bottle full of coins into the bank, they can’t do it; they don’t have the wherewithal. It’s a tedious transaction. But if you bring in a Sparkletts bottle to us, we’ll pay you in cash, less a 5 percent charge.
A lot of the banks will use us for counting. Let’s say you have an account at a bank, and your business is owning coin-operated washing machines. You take all those quarters to the bank. Since the banks don’t have the coin-counting machines, we’ll count the coins for them and send the bank a check. For a bank we’ll do it for 4 percent. Banks typically don’t pass that fee along to customers.
We supply a lot of the hotels with foreign exchange. We’ll do business with everyone. A lot of taxicab drivers will pick up fares at the airport from France, Germany, Switzerland, wherever, who don’t have American currency. They’ll drop them off here first, and wait for them out front, and I’ll exchange the money for them and they’re on their way. If they do it at the airport, they’ll charge 20 percent.
My main problem was letting people know we provide these services at a cheaper rate than most. I’d say 90 percent of our work is via referrals. We do a little bit of advertising. We run ads in the local papers, like the L.A. Times, the Argonaut.
I started producing a fax list for all the hotels and I got them on board by sending a weekly fax price sheet on all the foreign currency rates. We also made up cards and sent them to travel agents, hotels and the banks with directions to our location.
Now that we’ve been sending out this information on our services, a driver will come in, and we’ll hand him a stack of our cards, then he passes them along to a couple of buddies, and they’ll hand them to a couple of their buddies. Word of mouth. Then all you have to do is make sure you do everything right. You can do a hundred things right, but if you screw up one thing, it affects your reputation.
