I still see full-page ads for those overpriced dust collectors in my local dead-tree newspaper. Who buys that stuff, anyway? Not me, but you do you.
For that matter, has anyone here received a gift that obviously came from there, or some similar place?
I bought two horse sculptures from them, many years ago, as gifts for my then-girlfriend (now wife), who loves horses. They are still displayed on a shelf in our family room. They are actually really nice sculptures.
My grandmother bought a set of vases from them (or Franklin Mint?) and when she died, three of my sibs and I each got one. Absolutely not to my taste, but I’d feel guilty giving it away (I already tried to foist it on my daughter.) So it sits on a high shelf where it occasionally gets dusted, next to a birdhouse from my late MIL (also not to my taste) and a knick-knack from my husband’s aunt (yeah, you guessed it.)
I guess it’s the same demographic that buys commemorative plates or sets of figurines. All a matter of taste, I guess. One of my sisters was thrilled to inherit our grandmother’s Hummel collection…
Those of us here of retirement age probably have parents, or grandparents who buy / bought that crap. My Mom did some of that type of statue buying, although I can’t vouch that any of it was Bradford Exchange specifically.
Nowadays? I’m amazed they’re still in business. Their core demographic has to have just about all died by now.
My mother bought their collector plates as if they were gold bars. She didn’t even display most of them, just kept them in their original packing with the “certificate of authenticity.”
When she died, since I was the kid who lived in town, and also had a basement, II was delegated to be the custodian of the plates. Believe me, whether or not you still have the certificate of authenticity, there is NO market for Bradford Exchange collector plates, even the ones that are now 50 years old and could be considered antiques.
Their headquarters is in a nearby suburb and I pass it often (Milwaukee Ave @Golf Rd in Niles, IL). It seems very low profile, I bet it will be demolished for new dev soon.
Do they commission their own objects, or do they go out and find things they then slap the “Bradford” label on?
I don’t know and I’m certain there’s no manufacturing at the place I’m thinking of.
I was well into adulthood before I knew anything about them and never made the connection between ‘that office by the mall’ and the plate and collectibles people until later still.
We will be inheriting, one day, a ton of Hummels. Because my in-laws lived near the factory in Germany, and bought some rare ones, I’m hoping we’ll get…something…for it.
They aren’t even valued as salad plates! I go to a lot of estate sales, and I often see stacks of them, in their Styrofoam containers.
Whenever I encounter legit businesses like them who are in reality little more than cons, I always wonder what it feels like to be a long-time employee there. Whether low-level grunt, middle management, or honcho.
Do they know they’re ripping off rubes? Do they care? Are they proud? Does their Mom think they play piano in a whorehouse instead?
I inherited some of my grandmother’s Christmas decorations that came from there. Complete with certificate of authenticity.
Of course not. You can’t run them through the dishwasher.
It’s like sports cards, or mint-in-box action figures, except for the generation that liked Lawrence Welk. In fairness, the Bradford Exchange never actually claimed they’d increase in value - that was for the rubes to decide for themselves. And my mother did like some of the plates she bought enough to display them.
That hit close to home. Not me, but in the Comic Con biz you run into so many people who will spend hundreds (and hundreds of hours) for that perfect collectible. Be it a “a rare Mary Worth comic where she counsels a friend to commit suicide” or the elusive Gay Clark Kent action figure…
The parallels with commemorative plates are there, since I have friends who get their best comic books “slabbed”: graded, sealed in plastic… AND IMPOSSIBLE TO READ! (Sorry, a pet peeve…)
It’s a pet peeve of mine, as well. Comic collecting and toy collecting (where things have to be “mint in box”) seems so weird. You love these things so much that you collect them, only to make sure that you never ever use them for their intended purpose. It’s like you love them for the idea of them, rather than for what they actually are.
As for the Bradford Exchange, was it them, or the Franklin Mint, or some other outfit that did the Star Trek collectible plates? Whichever one it was, when I was in college I had a friend who ordered those plates in the name of an obnoxious guy that he didn’t like. Every month this guy would get another Star Trek plate in the mail, and couldn’t figure out why they kept sending them. Drove him crazy.
What can I say? When you’re 19 that kind of prank is the height of hilarity.
I think a LOT of that mentality got going with the huge price run-up in 1950s & 1960s baseball trading cards that occurred in the 1980s/1990s.
Suddenly collecting had a financial payoff, not just a nostalgia or play value payoff. Or at least a lot of people imagined that it did. A well-worn Barbie or whatever would someday be worth 50 cents at a garage sale whereas a new-in-box pristine one would be worth thousands. Thousands I tells ya!
Suddenly the psychological opportunity cost to take Barbie out of her box exploded. So there she sat; jailed for life, with limbs & neck tightly bound in plastic + wire twist-ties.
I think that maybe, just maybe some common sense is returning to those sorts of collectible markets. Where a greater fraction of folks are recognizing that the supply of “collectibles” and the fraction kept pristine, have both exploded, while the number of wannabe buyers has cratered.
Of course the companies manufacturing this trash are trying hard to prevent that word from spreading. But now the public has ways of reaching each other en masse.
She asks if they can get an employee discount.
I’ll bet Ken was behind it.
But he’s Kenough!
That was me when I was in middle school. I bought a bunch of baseball cards, even though I’m not really into baseball, thinking that if I just put them away for a few decades they’d be worth a fortune. Except everyone else did that, too, and now here we are a few decades later and baseball cards from the 1990s aren’t worth crap.
Because the entire reason mint condition baseball cards from the 1950s, comic books, Star Wars toys, etc. are worth a lot is because the vast majority of them were played with, read, stuck in some kid’s bicycle spokes, etc., thus making the mint condition ones actually rare.