You must have one hell of a bank....Cause most savings accounts pay out next to nothing in interest.

Despite that, yes, I have a savings account.
But I also know that I can tie up some of my money in pinball and actually end up making out way better percentage wise when I decide to sell as long as I bought smart in the first place. (Case in point, I've never bought new in box for good reason)

Economically, resellers do not affect a brand's pricing in this manner.

I do, its called the bank of Apple stock!

I'm just giving you a hard time, I know what you are getting at. And you only live once!

Pins aren't a substitute for the power of compounding though.

Definitely not a substitute. ..but I swear I make more picking change out of games I buy than interest from a savings account.

It would be interesting to compare some run of the mill stock values from one year to the next vs. Pinball price increases through.....hmm

In pinball it does and has.

Fake demand is created too by guys calling around and trying to lock up 3 or 4 pins that they think will be in high demand when all they want to do is resell it. Creates the mania effect for the "chumps" as Kman would describe it.

Anyone who has been through even a minor in business science will have been exposed to the precept of price elasticity/inelasticity. Some products will sell regardless of price, out of real or imagined need/scarcity. EpiPen is a great example. It doesn't matter what the price is as the invisible hands of free markets are hamstringed (crony capitalism) negating supply and demand. The price will be paid regardless and it can be said that such goods are price elastic. Conversely, where the invisible hand is allowed to do what it does (true capitalism), inelasticity will eventually cap a price for any given good.

Pinball machines are very much the latter as price inelasticity will match suppliers with demanders and prices will stabilize at fair market value wherever that may be. What we see today may well be the edge of the market and prices will soon pendulate and normalize. Or not... Market forces are fickle/irrational and not one man in a million can make such a prediction. There are simply too many variables to make an educated guess.

It boils down to what it always does. The percieved value of fiat petro credits in exchange for the perceived value of a good or service, ultimately making the argument moot. One cannot gouge a price inelastic good as value is in the eye of the beholder. The market simply will not bare anything to the contrary with few exceptions on the fringes.

Personally, I find more value in a wooden box of gizmos than I do in a dirty cocaine covered piece of worthless paper. That is, unless I'm short on worthless papers and need an EpiPen.

You will have to define "absolute maximum" with an actual number! But if you are going to ask an exorbidant (that means unreasonably high) price, i.e. price gouging, then IMHO you would qualify as a Douchbag! And I will laugh at you along with most other Pinsiders. LOL! But if you're OK with that, then by all means be my guest. There IS a sucker born every minute

I think there are two different conversations here. The used market for pins is entirely different than those putting money down on new pins. Free market for anything that isn't built anymore. Free market to anything pre release (think of every hot toy during holiday season), when supply is limited and someone has taken the time to hold and/or maintain a pin, it's there right in a free market to get whatever value they are willing to sell for. Yes prices have gone up, but right now it's a sellers market. If someone is patient, they will find a fair price for what they are looking for, or have to put some work into it. New machines are a different story, distributors are trying to get their hands on LE and Premium machines to service their customers. So putting a distributor at risk for cash is not an ethical practice IMO. There are always exceptions to anything. But we do live in a free market, and if someone doesn't want to pay asking price for a machine, so be it. The seller can lower their cost or wait for someone who is willing to pay the requested value. i see so many negative comments on FB and here for price police, if you don't like it...don't pay for it. Just my two cents.

When buying, people want a machine for dirt cheap. When selling, those same people want the machine to sell for top dollar.

That in a nutshell is the economics of Pinside.

And I have definitely found that not to be true.

"Rule of three" of the hobby I have used for three decades and it works:

1 ) Know your local "flippers" and don't sell to them. It's like a disease, and spreads like a virus. It is 10x worse than it was 10 years ago for example.

2 ) Sell to networked friends that you know will take care of the games for the right reasons. It keeps your games from showing up on Ebay or Craigslist the next day. Sometimes the whole experience can be a circle, and tue same games end up in your own hands again.

3 ) A game is sold at fair base value with considerations of restoration time and effort (if applicable), but not necessarily modifications. What this means is don't sell a game as "restored", if it still a "project".

The only thing that has changed is I don't give away project games anymore due to market stupidity. No more free rides to new enthusiasts. The ship left the harbor more than decade ago due to too many people that decided to take but never give anything back to the hobby. Those that have networks still use them with fairness.

Exactly..."fake rarity" isn't what irks you. What irks you is the LE/Premium are "the same damn game". Violent agreement!

snaroff

I see a whole lot of pins priced completely ridiculously.
I counteract this by not buying them.

There are 15 different conversations going on here.

In a typical whiny "greedy seller" or "price gouger" thread in a collector forum, the cause of the thread is that these whiny people don't understand how a free market works.

Sellers alone cannot drive prices up on a common luxury collector item.

It takes INCREASED DEMAND from BUYERS to push prices up. Or it takes a DECREASED SUPPLY. That's how a free market works.

These whiny people want to buy a 1955 Gibson guitar, or a WWII Thompson, or a 1971 Cuda, and they can't because rich baby boomers with two incomes have driven the prices to the moon.

A dentist, with a lawyer wife, who has his house paid off, and his kid's college paid for, and a combined income of $350,000 can easily afford to pay $25,000 for that Gibson guitar.

But Herbie Johnson can't, because he works at Walmart and is paying alimony. Then he goes on guitars.com and writes a whiny thread about how "greedy sellers have ruined the guitar collector hobby."

No Herbie, the baby boomers with a niagra river of money pouring out of their ass ruined the hobby.

When he was young, Fred the Dentist's big brother had a real nifty 1955 gibson guitar and now Fred wants one, and he'll pay a giant price because only 10 come up for sale each year.

And Fred the Dentist notices that the price of these guitars is going up, so he says, "Well, if I decide not to keep it, maybe I'll make a nice little profit."

A lot of times in the past when I sold something in high demand on ebay, I started the auction at $1 and the bidders pushed the price to several thousand dollars.

In that case, who set the price? The "greedy price-gouging seller" who started the auction at $1? Or the buyers?

I respectfully disagree if you have the money and watch the trends you can manipulation to a degree. It's been done in the stock market (which nowadays is illegal just ask the SEC).

I think that the price of common pinball games will always be linked to the price of new games.

The reason the prices are going up is because of increased demand from new people.

If the new people see that they can buy a brand new Stern for $7,000 and the price of a 30 year old Bally game is $10,000, a lot of them will just get the stern and call it good.

The new games will be a safety valve for all the new people entering the market.

I'm talking about common games, not super rare exotic high end games.

There are certain common collector items that EVERYONE seems to want. I call them the "blue chip" items.

I think that TZ, ToM and TAF are blue chip pinball machines, they always seem to sell briskly.

Please explain to me how I could manipulate the market for those pins.

I don't mean in theory, I mean in real life.

First I scrounge up around $20,000 and buy one of each.

Then what?

This is the best post in this entire thread. My thoughts exactly. If you buy a hot new machine, play it for a while and sell it for what you paid or more, fine. You're assuming some sort of risk by taking physical delivery of the game and laying out all of the money for it and you enjoyed it for a while. On the other hand, if you go around snagging spots on lists for games that other people legitimately want for their collections with refundable deposits just so you can scalp them it's a dick move. You're not assuming any risk and are being a weasel, taking advantage of your fellow collectors. I don't see why distributors allow known flippers, like people who use their podcast to create hype for the games that they're trying to flip, to get on lists. I'd be annoyed with a distributor who allowed a flipper to take a spot for a game that I wanted and might take my business elsewhere.

Selling games that have gone up in value for high prices on the other hand is how markets work. I'm fine with that.

That's exactly why it doesn't work in this manner. Resellers can't guarantee a product will sell out completely, they're a side effect of high demand and limited supply. If they could create fake demand, every LE and CE would be selling out within 24-48 hours on every pin, but that doesn't happen. That's up to end-user consumers to complete that circle and up to the manufacturer to produce X amount of product at the correct price that is slightly below what demand will actually be for the product. Basically, any business economics class that does a case study on this would come to this conclusion for well-known brands, without resellers a brand would keep supply less than demand.

I agree that flippers taking up spots in a preorder line is a dick move.

Because it disrupts the vendor's ability to get his product out to the buyers.

If the flippers want to flip, that's fine, but they should have some skin in the game in the form of non-refundable deposit.

Then the vendor get compensated for having his preorder list all gummed up with speculators that might back out.

All this stuff is not that mysterious if you study it a little, just watch how the auctions and transactions go.

There was a car called the Tucker Torpedo that pretty much nobody knew about, they were selling to a very small collector community for around $15,000.

Then a writer in Car & Driver did a really excellent article on them.

A famous director read the article and decided to make a movie about them.

The price shot up to $100k in a few months after the movie came out.

Recently one sold for almost $3 million.

Lots more people with lots more money who want to buy something a whole lot more = higher prices.

Collectors need to decide if they want low prices or they want "more people in the hobby", you can't have both.

This website we're on right now is one of the reasons the prices are going up, by making pinball collecting easier and more interesting to new people.

Excellent point. I was talking about scalping as being a dick move from the buyer's perspective, but there's no doubt that it's completely unfair to distributors as well. Let's say that there's massive hype around a game release. A spot scalper snags a spot in line. If the game lives up to the hype they take their profit for doing next to nothing. If the game is not as well received as hoped, they cancel their order and the distributor is left with an LE order spot that the person whose spot the scalper stole might have taken and not cancelled.

I don't mean to hammer this thread, but the "greedy seller" thing shows up on every single collector forum and it just simply makes no logical sense.

Like a couple of the other posters have mentioned, you'll never see the concept of "greedy collector sellers" discussed in any economics or business textbook.

One thing that people ignore in these threads is the fact that the price of collectible stuff often falls as well.

After WWII, a lot of GIs bought Hummel figurines home from Germany and gave them to their girlfriends.

The girlfriends started collecting them and the prices went to the sky.

Hummel decided to cash in and churned out a vast shit ton of Hummel branded crap. Since the crap was made specifically for collectors, no secondary collector market developed.

Then the WWII girlfriends got old and started dying off and the prices really dumped, Hummels are going for pennies on the dollar now.

So where is the "greedy seller" idea as it applies to Hummel crap? Hummel was the seller and they churned out so much stuff that they ruined their own market.

Same thing with a lot of Disney and Barbie collectible stuff, there's no secondary market so you pay $79.99 for the figurine and then you see it for $20 on ebay a few years later.

On the other hand, genuine Disney and Barbie toys and promotional stuff that are no longer made are going up in value.

Supply and demand.

Here's something to think about:

Japanese WWII artifacts are much more rare than German artifacts, but the German stuff is usually far more valuable. Because the collectors are more interested in the European theater than Pacific. Why? Because it's more interesting for some reason to them.

None of this stuff has anything to do with greed or douchebaggery, it's just the normal give and take of collecting anything.

The German stuff tends to be better made too. They didn't go total war production until late 1943 or early 1944. Civilian goods, toys, etc. While Japan didn't have the resources to begin with.

As an example there were lots of German toy soldiers made during the war until the end. I've only ever seen one cast iron Japanese toy soldier.

LTG : )

I should clarify:

There is a always some sleaziness, greed and douchebaggery in any human endeavor. Some people are creeps.

However, if they make a war movie that features a certain gun very prominently and collector interest and prices rise because of it, that's just normal supply and demand stuff. There's no point in whining about imaginary "greedy sellers."

The one funny thing about greed....it’s always the other person and not the one pointing at others.

Huh?

I would have no problem if all pin manufacturers charged a no refund deposit of 25%. That way people would have a fair amount of skin in the game. This $250 crap has to stop, it promotes speculating, and in the end could screw the distributors. i.e. the guys who are supposed to make a profit because they hung their shingle and are answerable to clients and manufacturers both. Just my humble opinion, for what it’s worth....

The people who go crazy calling others greedy, ignore the fact that they are greedy as well.

More people should do what I do. Pay in full when ordering.

Yeah, this podcaster is a real piece of sh*t. He's only motivated by his own vendettas (Pinside, Heighway, Dutch) and to flip refundable pre-orders for money based on the insider info he receives. He's not in pinball for the games or the community, just for himself.

If only Stern distributors would go the route of Spooky and make the deposits non-refundable, it would eliminate a few bad actors like this guy.

I never answered the OP's question.

Not to toot my own horn, but I did give away a free lighting kit to a random pinsider, so you know I'm not one of those guys who squeezes a quarter until the eagle screams.

But i don't buy this "making a profit is rude" idea.

There is no etiquette about making a profit. If you had bought a TZ in 1997 for $1500, there is no obligation at all to sell it today for $1500.

On the other hand, don't be one of those pricks who cries himself to sleep if he doesn't squeeze that last $5 out of a deal.

You know when you're being a prick and when you aren't. (Although opinions do vary.)

My attitude on buying and selling collector stuff is this:

If I buy a pin for $5,000 and i end up selling it for $1000, nobody is going to give me any money to make up for the loss.

So they shouldn't sanctimoniously try to tell me that I should sell something at a discount. The peanut galley has no skin in the game, so they don't get a vote.

Also, don't invent a new form of economics where "price gougers" use their magic powers to make people pay too much. It's not a real thing.

You can be fair with people. If you try for a happy balance in life, you'll never be perfect but you'll never be very wrong either.

Okay, i'm done (for now).

It's Trumps fault! All this extra money laying around just begging to be wasted on pinball... damn him!

You forgot the

If you ever get a pin you wanted at "The Friend Price" which could be undervalued in today's market, always always always always offer it back to that friend for that exact price since it was a deal and you essentially got to play that game for free. Otherwise, always pay what it's worth from a friend.

Many of us "MI" folks have done this.

Yea.. making a few bucks is nice but its also nice to keep a pin in the family so to speak.. that way you can keep playing them!