And, implied, had to hit a LOT of thrift stores, garage sales, bazaars, etc to find the stuff. There’s a little luck but the investment is primarily time & shoeleather.
You bring up a good point but we’re getting way off topic. I apologize for the hijack
You probably don’t want to hear about my collection of 120 electric kitchen mixers, all earlier then WW II.
You have to realize that in order to have that ability, you have studied the field for years. You can glance at the items in a yard sale or resale shop and know immediately if anything is worth looking at.
That has not been my experience. As I said, the person selling the KISS trashcan thought it was junk and was only asking a dollar. I have had that happen vastly more times than a seller knowing they have an item of value. And OTTOMH crappy ceramics stamped Made In Occupied Japan on the bottom are worth a few bucks. They remain crappy ceramics and are generally not worth very much. Now that so many toys from my childhood are being reproduced for collectors, being able to tell an original from a reproduction is more useful than ever.
ETA
Also in my experience “years of study” is not nearly as good as being born with the right instincts. OTTOMH, my uncle Sam heard I collected vacuum tubes and gave me some very old radios. I took the tubes out of the first one and then threw the radio away. The second one caused a gut feeling that it was valuable. This was before the internet. So, I asked my Mom ( a collector and sometimes dealer of antiques) what the radio was worth. She told me that in its current scratched up state, it was worh two to three hundred dollars. I immediately called uncle Sam and informed him and offered to return the radio. He said I could keep it.
Not to be the kind of Rolex flipper I’m talking about. All you need is a relationship with a dealer that likes you, and possibly a willingness to kick back a little of that profit to the guy that backdoors the watches to you if that’s how you got them.
I recently became aware of knockoff/counterfeit Sony camera batteries. The OEM batteries are expensive, so there are many less pricey aftermarket alternatives that are “honestly” labeled with their own brand names. The fake Sonys have several “tells”: cheap paper labels, lack of imprint on the battery case itself and most telling is the missing Sony hologram on the packaging or on the edge of the battery.
You Dopername begins to make more sense. Begins.
My mind is still all mixed up about it. 
This is true. The ethical failure was really on the part of the retailers. Very real evidence of their complicity in the whole thing. Anything from the blatant “buy these other watches and you can get one to flip” to straitforward under the counter kickbacks. They were acting almost certainly on the ragged edge, if not in breach of, their retail agreement with Rolex, and aiding in behaviour that annoyed real customers and damaged the Rolex brand. Flippers were in general not random people who got lucky.
Hence the recent efforts by Rolex to shut these avenues down. The hype train does nobody much good in the long run. The fools that bought at double RRP from the flippers are one loser. Some idiots thought watches were an investment. There was no shortage of shills pushing the idea at the time. Sure, and I have some juicy NFTs for you too. The other loser was Rolex, whose profile as the aspirational watchmaker of choice for the hoi poloi became enmeshed in perceptions of bad behaviour and the hype train. Something a long term brand cannot afford.
As the saying goes, it can take decades to build a brand but only moments to wreck it. Rolex got lucky in the 70’s and once they weathered the quartz crisis their unique corporate structure allowed them to invest and grow and build the brand like no other. They are clearly not run by fools. And not needing to meet quarterly targets aids this. Indeed the Swiss watch industry is an interesting landscape altogether.
Rechargeable battery fakes are rife in many markets. Same for power tools. And there are real risks. Lithium ion battery fires are altogether far too common and are usually sheeted home to poor quality batteries, either fakes, or cheap devices.
I have never, not once, told a prospective buyer that an antique or collectable was a good investment. There are far too many factors to predict that. OTTOMH, there was a time in the 90’s when my Mom’s potrait plates were worth about $200 each. They are currently in the same condition. But due to various things they are now worth at most $20 each.
The obvious problem with collectables of whatever nature is the age range that cares about that particular [whatever] gets continuously older & fewer.
E.g. collectable plates were big in my Mom’s generation and demographic. Were she alive today she’d be 92 and past her plate-buying years. As are the other folks who were once interested in such things.
Instead ever more collections are appearing in estate sales. As hers did umpteen years ago. Actually, I bet the wave of those sales has already peaked. But not before flooding a saturated market.
For whatever reason, that seems to be a particular malfunction of the luxury goods market in general. Leaving watches behind for a second, consider Ferrari. They’re another brand where you can’t just walk into a dealership and buy any given model. Because of the more or less handmade nature of the cars, and Ferrari’s understanding that they can make more money (and preserve the value of their brand) selling a few very exclusive vehicles at a high price vs filling the marketplace with as many cars as they can make.
So there’s competition to be able to buy anything above their entry level cars. To be allowed to buy a more exclusive model, you have to be ‘known’ to the brand. You have to have a history of Ferrari ownership. The more you’ve bought, the higher up the model chain you’ll get offered.
Ferrari does a better job controlling the flippers than Rolex does, in part because while Rolex makes millions of watches a year, Ferrari makes a few thousand cars and can more easily follow them. If you go into a Ferrari dealership, you’ll often see no new cars, but a whole bunch of low- and mid-tier used cars for sale with just about a thousand miles on them.
Here’s how their system works. Say you are a buyer early in your relationship with the brand. They know who you are, but you are not yet a big shot to be catered to. You might get a call from your friendly local deal offering you a particular car. It’s not one you particularly want. They know it’s not one you want. Yet you go in and buy it with this understanding - You buy the car at full MSRP. You DO NOT FLIP IT even though you probably could make a little cash doing so. If you flip it, this is where you get off the ride.
So you hold on to the car for a few months. You drive it about a thousand miles. THEN, you go back to the dealership and sell it back to them. They’ll probably offer you a little more than you paid. At the entry level, you’ll probably break even in the end after taxes and fees. As you move up the ladder, you start to make money on the deals. The dealer takes this now used car, free of any limitations on flipping, and puts it on their floor signficantly above the original list. Those are the cars available for noobs to buy and start their ride on the merry go round.
Back when I lived in Seattle and was deeply involved in the car scene there, I knew two guys on the logical far end of that journey. Both were basically offered any new car made by Ferrari, usually even before they were announced. One (possibly both) had a Ferrari passport, a little leather-bound ID booklet that allowed extreme privileges globally. Free entry to the factory at any time, including the top secret F1 shop. The opportunity to borrow any available car at any time.
One guy was able to buy one of Michael Schumacher’s 1997 F1 car and add it to his collection. He had to give the factory heads-up when he wanted to drive it, because they sold him everything except the ECU and the proprietary laptops to program the car to start. Even he wasn’t that trusted.
The other guy, last time I saw him, had just sold his '62 Ferrari 250 GTO for a record breaking figure of just about $50 million bucks. He had been given the rare opportunity to buy two examples of the halo car at the time, the LaFerrari. He had a hardtop and a convertible and could pick on a given day which way he wanted to drive without the fuss of puttting on or taking off the top. As far as I knew at the time, he was the only guy to ever get to buy two of the premier models.
Grammaware, fancy porcelain plates and figurines and so-called collectibles, already choke out most of the fun of garage sales. Auntie’s Hummel collection isn’t likely to cover her own burial.
The collectables that make money are the things that people collected as kids. Who is there to feel nostalgic about things collected by adults that are dying off? Not to mention that they were intentionally made as “collectables”.
I agree completely.
I was apparently unclear. Mom’s portrait plates were not the kind of crap made by The Bradford Exchange or some similar company that fleeces the gullible. They were genuine antiques. I fear I will get the details wrong. I will call Mom after work.
I once bought a pair of cheap “Roy Ban” sunglasses from a vendor in Greece. They were obviously cheap glasses like you might buy from Wal-Mart, and IIRC I only paid maybe €8 for them. I only bought them because I thought I’d lost my good sunglasses.
I read someplace that eBay killed the values of many collectibles. Formerly, a collector had to search estate sales, antique shops and the like to find examples of the things they’re interested in but once it was all easily available on eBay, the bottom dropped out of the market value of those goods.
That’s without a doubt true. It killed the baseball card shop in my town
eBay is the bottom trawling of the antique biz. Monstrously destructive as it scoops up the entire ecosystem, leaving nothing but wreckage in its path.
As to this:
and this
They are often the same thing. The stuff once collected by kids who are now dying off en masse is a glut on the market. The only people interested in that stuff are other dead or nearly-dead people.
The stuff once collected by kids who are now 55yos with excess cashflow are a different matter. For another 10 years until it’s time to see my prior paragraph.