(Topic ID: 221074)

How Will The Next Economic Crash Affect The Pinball Industry?

By o-din

5 years ago


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  • Latest reply 4 years ago by cottonm4
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#196 5 years ago

As the market and home prices go up people feel rich spend on toys a crash freezes spending many will be hurt. 2007 the distributor I bought my first two games from went under and Stern took a partner things will get ugly

#198 5 years ago
Quoted from cottonm4:

Thanks for the invite. I'll do what I do best and put you to sleep
*********************
Depression Glass: A Definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_glass
" Depression glass is clear or colored translucent machine made glassware that was distributed free, or at low cost, in the United States and Canada around the time of the Great Depression.
" Most of this glassware was made in the Ohio River Valley of the United States, where access to raw materials and power made manufacturing inexpensive in the first half of the twentieth century. More than twenty manufacturers made more than 100 patterns, and entire dinner sets were made in some patterns.
"Common colors are clear (crystal), pink, pale blue, green, and amber. Less common colors include YELLOW (canary),
*****************************************
I have not seen him in years but an old friend of mine collected, traded, and sold depression glass. Some us here load up a pin and drive for miles to reach the next pin festival to sell a pin, or buy a pin, or gawk, or just shoot the shit. The depression glass hobby is no different.
I had a friend who was into the hobby of buying and selling depression glass. Almost every weekend my friend and his wife would load up the van for the next show & sell. They might drive all the way to Colorado for a show.
One time, when the show was local I went out for a look-see. It was quite impressive with glass of all different colors laid out on folding tables. Beautiful rainbows of colors. Everywhere. Every once in a while you would hear the sound of glass breaking. Many single pieces of glass could be bought for $30.00 or less. However, some of these glass specimens are quite valuable. How about $700.00 for a water pitcher with some parrots festooned all the way around? So, when the sound of breaking glass was heard everybody sort of sucked in their breath.
Some of this originally low-priced glass makes pinball look like a cheap hobby.
****************
Ebay was still in relative infancy when I realized I could clean out my attic and make a tidy sum from my childhood treasures that had been unceremoniously shoveled into boxes years before. I started selling and did very well ( when I saw that a bobble-head doll of a Cleveland Indians baseball player that my mom gave in 1963 was selling for over $400.00 I knew my two pieces of plaster and a spring was destined for a new home. After a while I developed a nice 100% Ebay feedback and had credibility).
My friend called me one day and asked if I could sell a piece of glass for him on Ebay. I said, "Sure."
He had located a guy in Oklahoma who was selling out. This was a guy with money to burn and according to my friend, this dude had developed one hell of a collection of rare depression glass pieces. According to my friend, this well heeled individual was in a competition with some other rich bastard with accumulating rare and very rare pieces of depression glass. Call it a friendly competition, I guess.
The details escape me, but goes along the lines of the money burner getting beat out by the rich bastard for a particular set of rare depression glass pieces. In some way, this was getting rubbed into money burner's face and it pissed him off so bad that he said "screw it" and started selling.
That is the story part of the "I have one and you don't" attitude of high end collectors. You might conclude that these would be selfish individuals. I am not inclined to disagree.
End of Story
***************************
Up above I all-capped the word YELLOW. One of the patterns of depression glass is called Mayfair. There is pink Mayfair, green Mayfair, and I believe there is blue Mayfair. In the hobby these colors are fairly common. And then there is Yellow. I don't much about Yellow other than is ultra rare.
There was a medium size square yellow bowl that was produced. Only TWO were produced. So you are talking scarce. From Money Burner, my friend scored one of these two yellow bowls. He was giddy about it. He said it was worth $7K-$8K and he was getting it for $4000.00 ! One piece of glass for $4K---and you thought pinball machines were expensive. I thought is was all BS.
For my friend, I put up an Ebay auction for this rare piece of glass. We put it on a reserve price auction, of course. It has been too many years but I think we put the reserve of $4K to match his purchase price. I think the final bid I got on that piece of glass was $3800.00. Since it was a reserve auction, I always wondered if we had a real money bid or if it was someone sort of testing the waters to see how high they could go without getting stuck with the bid. I remember that there were not too many bids and at the time I thought they were real bids.
My friend laughed it off and did not seem to be bothered that he might have paid too much and went ahead and added this piece into his nice collection of depression glass.
***************
Here is one last thing you all may be able to relate to.
My friend and his wife owned an extra house in their town that they used as warehouse space for all of their glass. He ways always telling me how much glass they sold at where ever. My friend was just an old country boy; One day he finally admitted to me that they did not make much money at it. That it was their hobby that they could enjoy together, it kept them busy, and they got to meet a lot of people.
My other story is about a different friend who used to paint and "weather" model trains who was sort of "F'd over by a different rich bastard who was into the model train hobby. If you like throwing your money into black holes get into the model train hobby.

LOL when Ebay was just stating antiques were strong and there was big money to be made. Now many if not most items that sold for $2,000 now go for around $400 most antique shops and shows are now gone so the value can disappear

1 year later
#276 4 years ago
Quoted from too-many-pins:

Not if you are smart enough to keep your saving away from the stock market! About 35 years ago I got into playing with the "futures market" and did very well for a year or so. Then I made a couple bad investments that cost me all my gains and then some. After that I decided to just invest in things I can touch, see, and feel. Sometimes it has worked out very well and other times just OK but I have never lost money buying real items and not stocks. Not many investors can say that if they are in the stock market.
I managed to "semi retire" when I was 51 years old and I'll need two lifetimes to sell off all the stuff I have "hoarded" over the years as investments. Since I semi retired I basically sell off stuff as I need a little money, play with pinball stuff as a hobby, and travel as much as possible. I'll never be the richest guy in the cemetery but I'll have enough money coming in each month to enjoy life & eat well until I get their.
What I did wouldn't work for most people but looking back I wouldn't do it any other way.

There is a huge difference between the futures market and stocks

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