Thread, but I have been thinking of this and your response.

I have seen this done (checking to make sure racks are full) by cashiers at poker rooms all over Southern California and Las Vegas, and I have never noticed scratches on the inlays of any of these chips. I think these new chips are just very cheap inlays which is why they get scratches like this.

Can you imagine how horrible these chips will look over time?

My regular card room, Oceans 11, has inlays on their chips and have been using the same chips for many years and I inspected a full rack of their $1 and another full rack of their $5 chips and I barely noticed a scratch, certainly nothing like is shown in the photo..