DEATH TO HOT WHEELS GEEKS!

[Soria]

:: eyebrow arches.::


Yesh some people are weird. Even in my hay day of being a Ninja turtles freak. ( I had a large ninja turtle suitcase FILLED with them) when I was ten, I was not as bad as those men. I mean, for pete's sake people, their toys, to be played with!

[Amethyst Hunter]

instead of spending their money on something productive like losing their virginity

Look at it this way. Do you REALLY want people like this to be bumping uglies and therefore risk producing more SCs? Perhaps it is for the good of the world that such folk do not partake of intercourse.

[Nayeli_Sabia]

Honeslty I think that's what separates the people who are looking to collect these things as some sort of twisted investment, and the TRUE collectors.

And that goes for anything, look at the guys who have those HUGE collections that take up entire rooms and stuff, a LOT of it is not mint condition, because they find it at thrift stores, garage sales, stored in attics and forgotten about... but they keep em anyway, because they're collecting because they like collecting, not because it'll be "worth something some day".

My Step Father in Law is a "investment collector" who's convinced that his beanie babies, hot wheels, DVD's, promo mugs, Magnets, plates, crap will fund his retirement. He insists on buy two of everything. One to use/watch, and on to keep in 'mint'(a lot is damaged due to lack of care)



I hate visiting him.

[protege]

I thought it was hilarious to see people spend hundreds of dollars on Beanie Babies...only to get pwned when the market for them suddenly disappeared

But seriously, using my model collection as an example... I know that it won't fund my retirement. Maybe if all those kits had been left alone, but I couldn't do that. I bought them to (eventually) build, or to use some of the parts in other projects.

That's not to say that I couldn't have made a profit on some of them... Back in the early 1990s, I had just bought a Bugatti EB110 by Monogram. The kit had just come out, and was in seriously short supply. Luckily, I found one before they all disappeared. While it was sitting on my workbench, one of my brother's friends saw it...and offered me $100 on the spot. I could have sold it, but I wanted it...and finding another one proved difficult. Needless to say, I turned him down.

Then there's the 1963 Plymouth Valiant promo. Not selling that either. Originally the promo thing worked like this--you bought a new car, and sometimes you'd get a little plastic version with it. Many times, those promos were later re-tooled and sold as kits. What's driven the prices up, is that they were only issued for a short time, and many haven't survived well. The plastic wasn't that great to begin with...and kids sometimes "customized" them.

And lastly, my Porsche 944. This kit hasn't been reissued in years. Mine came from the hobby shop's junk box. Nobody wanted it, because it looked pretty bad. The box was a bit crushed, and it had one or two missing parts. Even though I've had offers to sell, I've turned them all down. Reason? Well, I have several of the other cars in the series--Ferrari 308, Mercedes 450SL, Datsun 240Z, plus I have several other Porsche models. The 944 was one of the few I don't have.

Getting back on topic here...I'm sure I could get a bit more than what I've paid for some of my models. However, that's not why I started collecting them.

[Kogarashi]

Closest I've got is a copy of Dungeons & Dragons Clue that I managed to score on eBay a few months ago. Everything else of mine was specifically purchased to play with or to put on display (out of the packaging).

With the Clue game, I managed to find it for $40 on eBay, when the previously cheapest price I'd seen was about double that online from either the UK or Australia (and that's not counting shipping). Cheapest State-side was about $150 on the Amazon Marketplace. I could've totally turned around and resold my eBay copy for a tidy profit, but I bought that thing to play with, dangit, and didn't know when I'd find another one.

[Devonian]

This sort of thing is widespread in just about every toyline, I've found. Lots of people buying up toys for resale on the Internet and such.

Take Transformers for example. The movie sparked a fucking EPIDEMIC of scalping, to the extent that the toys were almost impossible to find for weeks after they came out (and I imagine it'll be the same with the upcoming sequel's toyline). Animated's not quite that bad, but there's several toys from every wave that seem to get snatched up the second they hit the shelves...

[protege]

Then there are the idiots who will gladly pay up for a "vintage" or "rare" item on Ebay. Never mind that it just came out, and can be easily found at any store for about 70% less than the Ebay price... Even better, if said "vintage" or "rare" item has about 500 listings on any given day. Rare, my ass, in other words

[Argabarga]

Auctions are a tool to victimize those too lazy to do the research

[Rine]

You know, I have always wondered why Hotwheels were some of the first things to sell out when we got our toys in for Christmas.

And now that I think of it, there were some men that would buy tons of it and I never understood why. They would always ask if I had some in the back and the answer was always no. We only get so many toys in each year and once they are go, that's that.

I didn't know that Hotwheels collecting was such a big hobby for a seemingly large amount of people. Learn something new everyday...