The One-Eyed Indian Who Bought My Underwear.
True story. Last August I held a yard sale in the front of my apartment building. This is me trying to sell some pajamas:
Would you buy pajamas from this man?About halfway through day two an elderly Indian couple and their grandson, whom they were training to be both a thief and a liar judging by the example they set, arrived to haggle. The husband bought some shorts and an old shirt from me, conveniently understanding every other word of English though he seemed to speak it fine. After buying $10 worth of clothes but paying $8, I had to leave my post to show his shriveled mummy-wife that the blender I'm selling does indeed work. Though this was proven, she still refused to buy it because a piece of the rotor was made of plastic (I hear those metal-on-metal blenders sell like hotcakes).
After returning to my table I was once again confronted by the Monty Hall of Delhi, who this time was waving a pair of my own underwear in my face. Unbeknownst to me the bag of clothes that was meant to go to the trash wound up in the sale pile, and suddenly I was once again facing the old martini-glass shorts I thought would never see another day.
"C'mooooon ..." Monty said. "I take."
On principal I couldn't let this guy, a dirty old man with a cloudy grey dead eye that seemed to regard everything with a thought apart from the one rattling in his age-addled head, have anything more from me. True, the underwear weren't even part of the sale to begin with, and after talking him into fifty cents for my years-old drawers I was happy to see him, his crusty wife and the little child with a toy he didn't pay for exit the premises.
I vowed never to hold a yard sale ever again. I also learned the depreciation on a pair of underwear goes like this:
S = ([P/N]/T)/2
Where S is the sale price, P is the price you originally paid, N is the number of people who have worn the underwear, and T is time (in this case, years passed between the time they were purchased and the time they are sold).
I tried to do similar math for my commemorative Mario Galaxy coin (Face it: You were wondering where I was going with all this). I remembered the coin just last week as I busted out Mario Galaxy 2 (review coming soon) and realized, "It's been two years; I wonder how much that coin is worth."
The relative value of anything deemed "Limited edition" or "Collector's Edition" has been rendered virtually nil over the past 20 years. Like I do with many other things in life, I blame George Lucas. Before he came along, there wasn't this need to brand anything "Collector's edition" because the collectors didn't quite know what they had. Did my parent's generation ever think to hang on to all those Babe Ruth baseball cards? No, most of them wound up in the spokes of bicycles making helicopter noises.
Until Star Wars, no movie had that kind of merchandising push. The toys, electric toothbrushes, coloring books, silverware, etc. were offered everywhere, and made in great abundance. This is where the economics come in: You make enough of something, its value sinks because the market is saturated and that drives the price down (simple supply-and-demand stuff). It gets worse if the product you put to market gets copied, effectively flooding the market with twice as much of the same thing:
On the left, the Ewok Village playset by Kenner.
On the right, the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves
playset that emerged five years later
After returning to my table I was once again confronted by the Monty Hall of Delhi, who this time was waving a pair of my own underwear in my face. Unbeknownst to me the bag of clothes that was meant to go to the trash wound up in the sale pile, and suddenly I was once again facing the old martini-glass shorts I thought would never see another day.
"C'mooooon ..." Monty said. "I take."
On principal I couldn't let this guy, a dirty old man with a cloudy grey dead eye that seemed to regard everything with a thought apart from the one rattling in his age-addled head, have anything more from me. True, the underwear weren't even part of the sale to begin with, and after talking him into fifty cents for my years-old drawers I was happy to see him, his crusty wife and the little child with a toy he didn't pay for exit the premises.
I vowed never to hold a yard sale ever again. I also learned the depreciation on a pair of underwear goes like this:
S = ([P/N]/T)/2
Where S is the sale price, P is the price you originally paid, N is the number of people who have worn the underwear, and T is time (in this case, years passed between the time they were purchased and the time they are sold).
I tried to do similar math for my commemorative Mario Galaxy coin (Face it: You were wondering where I was going with all this). I remembered the coin just last week as I busted out Mario Galaxy 2 (review coming soon) and realized, "It's been two years; I wonder how much that coin is worth."
The relative value of anything deemed "Limited edition" or "Collector's Edition" has been rendered virtually nil over the past 20 years. Like I do with many other things in life, I blame George Lucas. Before he came along, there wasn't this need to brand anything "Collector's edition" because the collectors didn't quite know what they had. Did my parent's generation ever think to hang on to all those Babe Ruth baseball cards? No, most of them wound up in the spokes of bicycles making helicopter noises.
Until Star Wars, no movie had that kind of merchandising push. The toys, electric toothbrushes, coloring books, silverware, etc. were offered everywhere, and made in great abundance. This is where the economics come in: You make enough of something, its value sinks because the market is saturated and that drives the price down (simple supply-and-demand stuff). It gets worse if the product you put to market gets copied, effectively flooding the market with twice as much of the same thing:
On the left, the Ewok Village playset by Kenner.On the right, the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves
playset that emerged five years later
So knowing that my commemorative Mario coin was literally one in a million (or more) I looked it up on eBay today. Prices ranged from 99 cents to $40. The thing is, eBay lets you set your own starting price, so that $40 doesn't guarantee someone is willing to pay what you're asking. I saw someone offer a $30 bid for a coin, but on eBay you can't tell if that is a serious bid or the seller trying to drive up the price.
I've come to the conclusion the coin isn't worth anything more than the peace of mind it represents: I received it because I pre-ordered the game, guaranteeing my Italian plumber-infused bliss at the first possible moment. In that case, if P is peace of mind, R is the reaction and T is time:
P = R(T2)
A second coin, regretfully, did not accompany Mario Galaxy 2 but that's OK because apparently if you still want the first game's coin you can find it if you look hard enough.
Or you can have mine. Bidding starts at $500.
I've come to the conclusion the coin isn't worth anything more than the peace of mind it represents: I received it because I pre-ordered the game, guaranteeing my Italian plumber-infused bliss at the first possible moment. In that case, if P is peace of mind, R is the reaction and T is time:
P = R(T2)
A second coin, regretfully, did not accompany Mario Galaxy 2 but that's OK because apparently if you still want the first game's coin you can find it if you look hard enough.
Or you can have mine. Bidding starts at $500.
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