Boulder, CO
> Why are people paying so much for pins?
Supply/demand
(Topic ID: 120635)
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Quoted from kaneda:I've got a single Transformer toy that's worth $8,000. Would I pay that now for one? No way. I purchased it in 1995 for $600. Go figure.
Please tell me you're going to sell that soon.
Quoted from kaneda:I should It's so hard to part with collectibles. Which is another reason why pin prices are heading so high.
It's got to be hard to sell something like that when prices are going up, but certainly there is a finite window of time that people would pay crazy money for it, right? Eventually, it'll be like $5 again.
Quoted from kaneda:A mint in box Fortress Maximus sold for 10K 2 years ago. Mine's about as mint as it gets. That Pepsi Optimus Prime is worth another $3,000. The toy market is insane and makes a pinball machine with TONS of moving parts seem like a bargain.
Awesome. I bet if you do research on other collectible markets, you can figure out approximately how long the bubble will last.
And you make a great point...some things, like cars, have a higher floor for prices - because the parts themselves have value. Toys, not so much.
Quoted from kaneda:Eventually when everyone who once had a connection to the original toy line is dead, then yes, the value may go down.
So...yes, the value will go down. It'll be long before everyone "is dead" though. I'm no expert, but I'd be surprised if there is an example of a nostalgia based collectible market that didn't have a quick bubble and crash. It didn't take people dying to pop the bubble on baseball cards. Or muscle cars. People who are paying top dollar for rare NES games right now are what, in their 30's and 40's. No way someone is going to pay $50k for a NES cartridge 40 years from now.
They may still be going up now, but it will go down again.
Quoted from anubis2night:Muscle cars transcend the generational mark.
For some reason, I thought the bubble had already burst on muscle cars. Apparently not: http://www.hagerty.com/valuationtools/market-trends
Quoted from kaneda:I think what drives a lot of prices up are categories where you can actually "Complete" a collection.
That's an interesting distinction. But, at the same time, won't that put a time-limit on the madness? Once all the people who care have completed their collection, then no one is buying anymore.
Quoted from Ven:I have made a few 11hr round trips to get pins
It costs $400 to get a pin shipped vs 11 hours of your time + $70 in gas.
If my math is correct, an 11 hour trip for a pin means you value your time at less than $30/hr. For some people, it's probably less than that, for others, it's much, much higher. Some lawyers make $300+ per hour! They could bill almost $1000 in the time it takes to drive across town to look at a pin, load it into their car, bring it back home.
Quoted from CaptainNeo:Not many of us make anywhere near $30 and hour. most people i know are lucky to make $14-16 an hour. So I wouldn't value drive time at $30 an hour.
It'd be interesting to see the numbers. I kind of assumed that the average pinhead makes an above average salary...simply because it's an expensive hobby (which also requires space, which on average, requires money).
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