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The Almighty Buck IT Technology

Collectors Are Finding That Their Childhood Has a Price - and It's Going Up (nytimes.com) 63

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The stock market, real estate and cryptocurrencies did poorly in 2022, but the global luxury goods market grew 20 percent. People may have had less, but they spent more on fine arts and collectibles that serve no function except to provide pleasure. From a report: The culture is bursting with new material -- every day, thousands of new books are published and 100,000 new songs are released on Spotify -- but the old stuff offers a sweeter emotional payoff for many. It could be tapes or posters or pictures or comics or coins or sports cards or memorabilia. It might be from their childhood or the childhood they never had, or it might merely express a longing to be anywhere but 2023. The common element is this: People like to own a thing from a thing they love. For Mr. Carlson and millions like him, the nostalgia factory is working overtime.

When Mr. Carlson first began to look for sealed VHS cassettes, they were considered so much plastic trash. "Back to the Future," "The Goonies," "Blade Runner," were about $20 each on eBay. He put them on a shelf, little windows into his past, and started an Instagram account called Rare and Sealed. Then tapes began to get scarcer and much more expensive. People trapped at home had lots of money to spend during the pandemic. But it was more than that. Objects with a bit of history have an obvious attraction in a high-tech world. The current cultural tumult, with its boom in fake images, endless arguments over everything and now the debut of imperious A.I. chatbots, increases the appeal of things that can't be plugged in. At the same time, advances in technology mean it is ever easier to buy expensive things online. Bids at auctions routinely reach tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars.
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Collectors Are Finding That Their Childhood Has a Price - and It's Going Up More

Collectors Are Finding That Their Childhood Has a Price - and It's Going Up

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  • The old collectors are dying (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zaax ( 637433 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @11:16AM (#63449542)
    Prices of 1950's motorcycles are dropping because the people who had them in their teens and brought them again in their old age are now dying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      Those are the motorcycles with leaky gaskets that weight too much and have really long stopping distances.

      They might be great for looking at, but not so much for riding.

      • They're the perfect bike if you like fixing motorcycles and changing oil.

        • They're the perfect bike if you like fixing motorcycles and changing oil.

          Don’t forget the good stuff like replacing the points and gapping them. But of course, the real fun only starts pre-20’s which I believe is around the cut off from requiring arcane levers, buttons, switches, and petals with a few clandestine ones thrown in just because.

      • Those are the motorcycles with leaky gaskets that weight too much and have really long stopping distances.

        So rebuild the motor and upgrade the brakes. Doing a rebuild on a motorcycle is like playing with models compared to working on a car.

      • Those are the motorcycles with leaky gaskets that weight too much and have really long stopping distances.

        That's why their previous owners are dying... /rimshot

    • I enjoyed the scenes in Futurama showing piles of junk with the mona lisa and other such historic pieces sticking out of them

      It is all garbage to somebody, when that becomes everybody then it is no longer collectible

    • Not Harleys, but the British bikes which long ago disappeared into collections so no one younger than sixty knows them except as photographs.

      1950s motorcycles are extremely slow, have terrible brakes and you must be a skilled mechanic to ride one regularly so they lack appeal today. Their collectors were the earliest of boomers and there is no community to pass them to in the US. The UK is outlawing fossil fueled vehicles so while it's common to re-import old machines they're too expensive in the declining

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      A couple of decades ago, I saw a small "parade" of Model Ts on a trip, pulling over into a forest preserve parking lot. I stopped to talk to the old timers about their cars. I guess it's the first time I had ever been in one. One man lamented that the hobby is dying off because the members were dying off.

      It kind of made me sad because as neat as I would think it would be to have/work on such a simple machine, I don't have the time or money to take care of it properly, so what will happen to them? W

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        This is pretty much the story with all pre-war period cars. Naturally there are exceptions for hyper rare things of notable marks or famous examples from racing etc but generally speaking the market for 20-30s vintage cars is off its inflation adjusted high, and I don't see it coming back.

        I expect the same thing is going happen with collectors examples for the 60s here as the boomers who covet those cars because they were they lusted after it in highschool but could not have one for start to get to old to d

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          I own one of those 1960s cars; ironically, I think I was in it when stopped to see the Model Ts. I know first-hand how such a hobby is very resource-expensive, even if the car just sits in a garage. I don't see as many people in the future being interested or able to take that on. Further, the hobby will continue to shrink as these modern "computers on wheels" become less possible to repair as time goes on.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )

      O scale trains as well.

      Following the pattern, I bought a NeXT with a Dimension board. I used to use one all of the time in high school. I recorded November Rain on it, my first use of high-bit digital audio recording. I'd done previous projects with digital audio, but not of that quality. A friend of mine was amazed that that capability existed at all. This was years before anybody had ever heard of MP3. While it had a lot of sentimental value and a lot of historical significance (32-bit color in 1991!), it

  • Eh they can keep them. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm of that time period, and could not get rid of them quick enough when CD and Blu-ray got here. Do I want all that VHS and vinyl/cassette back? Hell no. CD audio was and is the minimum optimum. Not interested in low fi media for hipsters sake.

    • While many people have hobbies and collecting is part of that....

      There's also an old saying that is apropos...

      "A fool and his money....are soon parted".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      One thing to consider is that all this NIB stuff was never used, enjoyed, loved. It was part of a childhood for kids who crew up to be accountants. Never had childhoods. I donâ(TM)t begrudge them the profit. Just the loss.

      • It's hard to actually even keep that stuff in good condition for long enough for it to appreciate. I didn't have any relatives to keep stuff for me in their garage until it became worth money, nor my own garage

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jhecht ( 143058 )
      Keep them long enough and you can make money on some stuff. Got any old Philip K Dick books in good shape? Check on ebay before you toss Mac laptops from the 90s.

      • In the 90s I destroyed entire typing classes worth of pristine condition Apple][ computers with my friends and a makeshift bowling alley. and I just checked ebay and actually.. actually they’re worth a lot less than last time I checked.

        Weird. Well that’s one less regret.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jhecht ( 143058 )
          Rarity matters a lot. If you had destroyed an Apple 1, you would have plenty to regret. But so does importance. Judging from what's sold recently on eBay, my 1985 512K Macintosh would be worth around $100 if nonfunctional, and $200-$300 in working condition. Probably well over 90% of everything is junk, but you can't be sure what is until you look -- or try posting it on eBay.

          • Dude not that long ago early macs and apple][ s were going for almost $1000 in good condition and more than that if they had some optional accessories and all the manuals.

            I think.I could have sworn.

        • At my high school in the 90's, they used those old Apple ]['s for the typing classes. They had stacks of them from the labs where they were replaced. When one broke, they didn't bother with fixing - it got tossed and they grabbed another off the stack. They were disposable junk back then, though the real junk was the Mac Performa's that replaced them.

          At the time I would have never thought they'd be worth anything. Same with old PC's for that matter.

    • I certainly wouldn't say something like a record is "low fi" like you are making it out to be. CDs are good, and excellent for multiple playbacks with minimal noise floor and get the vast majority of the song/music/audio capture. But they do it at a price, which was loss of signal in the frequency response, as it can not record a 1Hz or less frequency (and have difficulty with frequencies below 22.5), and lose of frequencies above 21KHz. They also quantize the frequencies, as it can't record the exact actua

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        The analog recordings on records can in fact capture those exact frequencies and reproduce them.

        I'll grant you analog can recordings and produce frequencies that CDs can't as if those have any stronger relationship to the original sounds, in the case of vinyl records probably no... Now if we are talk 1" tape masters or something okay..

        • Are those 1" master tapes available in a "commonly available lossless format"?

          If so, then I am in, but the last one that I heard of was called Pono, and it seems to have gone the way of the Dodo

    • Agreed. I went through a personal digital revolution. Everything was digitized, backed up to the cloud, backed up on disk, and sent off to goodwill.

      I have a few small regrets and ended up buying a few paper books and like one CD that’s not available digitally even on TPB but mostly it’s a ton of crap I never need to waste time moving, pruning, cleaning, storing, etc.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      The nice thing about records is that if one manages to survive 1000 years, you'll still be able to play it. Be it in some futuristic utopia or some post-apocalyptic hell-scape, you can cobble together all you need to listed to a record out of just about any old scrap you can find lying around.

      The same can't be said about anything newer. How much longer do you think we'll be able to play those blu-ray discs?

  • It's market manipulation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @11:19AM (#63449558)
    Brian's Toys & Entertainment Earth did this for years, scalping desirable new Star Wars toys and cornering the market on vintage ones. Smaller scalpers do it to. Easy return policies make it hard for it to backfire.

    A bunch of bastards have started "grading" video games in order to draw in speculators, which is making prices skyrocket. They've been caught wash trading (e.g. buying the games they graded from themselves) in order to pump the market.

    It's just another (albeit minor) symptom of problems with our economy in general. It's tough to make money honestly, what with all the multinationals owning all the market share, so you get more and more of these nasty little scams and scalpers.
    • You have it backwards. It's actually a sign that our economy has generated so much wealth that you can make a decent living by running a scam over something so inane. No one could create this kind of scam in North Korea because practically no one owns any games and few people have the money to buy them. If you live somewhere that's still doing little more than subsistence farming this wouldn't work either because everyone has to devote all of the labor just to feeding themselves and their family.

      But ther
      • Of people with poor money skills and the neurodivergent. The poor money skills guys are people hoping to strike it rich selling expensive collectibles. They watch a few episodes of pawn Stars and go nuts. But the ones that really feel bad for are the ones neurodivergent. Things like OCD and autism lead people to spend a lot of money they don't necessarily have.

        And I'm sure you can find the same sort of things going on in North Korea just with a bartering system since their economy is barely functional.

  • I didn't find it anywhere near as appealing as he did because these old coins weren't part of my childhood, despite his efforts to get me interested. Companies like Whitman did what they could to encourage people to buy coin albums and pick things out of change, but as soon as it came to slabbing coins with professional grades and converting them into 'investment property' it destroyed the mass appeal, without which it's not attracting new interest. And, modern issues are so mass-produced as to defy notio

    • Coins aren't the only thing that have lost value. One of my grandfathers was into stamps. He bought complete sheets of new issues and put them away as an investment. Then, when he tried to cash in, he learned that the market for uncanceled stamps had dropped and his sheets weren't even worth face value. He ended up using them as postage, although doing so broke his heart.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jhecht ( 143058 )
      I collected coins when I was a kid, and my aunt gave me some of hers, but I sold off most of them that were worth anything and kept some old coins as curios.

  • For a lot of these things, the matter doesn't matter.
    You can download high-quality PDFs of most of the books and magazines you cared about.
    Music, movies, and TV don't depend on crappy tapes anymore.
    You miss playing BC's Quest for Tires on your C64? Play a disc image in VICE on your current computer.
    If you were to buy an overpriced C64 on eBay and get it working with modern video, the SID chip's probably gone anyway.
    Thanks to digitization and the Internet, now you can have your nostalgia gratis.

    • Re:Go digital (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @11:36AM (#63449600) Journal
      Once again, missing the point. Sure, you could get a pdf of a book, but what's the fun in that? You miss out on the tactile sensation of turning pages, the smell of old paper [rd.com], the physical object itself.

      Similarly, playing on a C64 can be far more enjoyable than loading an image on your modern computer. It's the act of loading the tape or disc, hearing the whir of parts, the sounds it makes as it gets ready to load the game. Then there is the act of playing the game on the original hardware with all its flaws.

      Let me guess, you don't like sitting down and eating, do you? You just shove a hose down your throat and have the gruel deposited in your stomach.
      • Yep I am a collector and there is nothing like restoring and using the old hardware which brings back youthful memories and enjoyment
      • Parent is right, using an emulator is good enough for most of us. I don't have space for an old computer I will use 2 hours every year, loading a CPC emulator is enough to fulfill my nostalgia (even youtube is enough because these games were horrible). Retrogaming is crippled by speculation, you can go to a retrogaming museum instead of giving money to this market.

      • You're right; I don't get it. To me, a book is pictures and text. A song is a sound. I don't miss the noisy cassette tapes of my youth, just the songs.
        I've been using emulators of one kind or another since 1996, when I first used V9T9 on DOS to play games I remembered from the TI-99/4A.
        I don't have to have that crappy keyboard. I don't miss how prone to overheating that computer was. But I still get my Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus.

    • Then the matter IS all that matters (Score:5, Insightful)

      by spazmonkey ( 920425 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @11:48AM (#63449642)

      If everything is free and digital, the physical artifacts become far more relevant on an emotional level. Yes, everyone can digitally generate a 2600 Hz tone easily with any free sound app, but that has zero value to me, on any level. My little blue plastic bosuns whistle that came out of a box of Captain Crunch cereal in the fall of 1969, however, that hangs in a specially constructed glass case above my desk. The attraction is purely emotional and has zero to do with its utilitarian value.

    • Music, movies, and TV don't depend on crappy tapes anymore.

      Provided they've been rereleased. For example, Filmation's 1987 animated film Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night hasn't been rereleased on DVD or BD in the United States. Nor have a few Disney films. Only VHS exists.

  • Collectibles are a terrible investment (Score:4, Interesting)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @11:54AM (#63449652)

    You might like collectibles and feel like they have value. You might even stumble into something of high value. But for the most part, you would have been better off in some kind of traditional investment.

    For fun? Sure. For profit? Have fun waiting and hoping.

    The things that were important to my grandparents and parents are not so important to me. You'll probably need to sell your collectibles to someone in your same age group.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dirk ( 87083 )

      They are a terrible long term investment, but can be a wonderful short term investment. They are no different than any other speculative investment (crypto, stocks, M:TG cards, etc.) the key is knowing when to get in and when to get out. If there are articles like this being written, it is probably already too late to get in and make any real money. There are plenty of people who make a killing, but that is because they were lucky enough to get in early and got out at the right time. There are also plenty o

  • Years ago, I got a used Nintendo 3DS for free. I gave it to my son for a birthday present, along with two 3DS Zelda games. Got both games on eBay, new & sealed, for $15 each, back in 2020.

    Now these same games are going for $30 - $40...UNLESS you stick them in a plastic box and get a CGC-rating [cgcvideogames.com] on them. Those are going for hundreds. [ebay.com] Amazing how quickly you can inflate the value of a product with such a minimal amount of effort.

  • It ain't what it used to be.

  • There is a world full of new experiences just waiting to be explored. The moment you close yourself off and start living in the past is the moment you stop living and begin dying.

    • Yeah, I'm having a hard time getting very worked up over this. It's not as if these people saved this stuff as they were growing up... we're talking about adults who now what to buy stuff from when they were a kid. If a lot of people are doing it, the price goes up - that's just how things work.

      If the problem is speculators are buying stuff up... just don't buy it from them. If everyone does this, you'll be able to get it much cheaper a few years down the road.

  • I sell random stuff on eBay. I was going to trash an old, glass Carmex jar that I had just finished. I decided to sell it and got a remarkable $26 for it. I asked the woman why she bought it. She said that it reminded her of simpler times and looking at it just made her happy. For $26, I can't think of a better value.

  • speculative bubbles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sursurrus ( 796632 ) on Friday April 14, 2023 @01:41PM (#63449960)

    Don't believe a word of this bullshit. The 'rare and sealed' market is dominated by bad actors trying to create speculative bubbles. In many cases they are the same people who created bubbles around the 'rare coins' market of the 1980's

    One of the reasons this is the perfect bubble market is that

    1. shrink wrap degrades over time, so 'grades' of sealed media become possible
    2. 'experts' on grading are very much part of the scam
    3. shrink wrapping things to the specs of the past is not very difficult. Since opening the wrap destroys the value, what people are actually buying are shrink wrapped mint condition boxes of the right weight.

  • So I was under the impression that certian PC gaming parts were virtually unavailable. This was from watching vintage collectors on Youtube ramble on.

    Yet uhhh I won’t say what parts I looked up as to not excite speculators but the prices are WAYYY lower than the impressions these guys left me with in their videos. I could build a perfectly pimped out 486 no problem.

  • And we, as a family, have now decided to stop spending a lot of time at home, and on the contrary, to do more sports and be active. As a result, we decided to enroll the whole family in a swimming school in London https://3sswim.co.uk/ [3sswim.co.uk] , so far more than any other interested in it. What do you think, is it realistic to learn to swim quickly as an adult?

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