Got sucked into the maw of the downstairs yesterday instead of boxing books. Wanted to make sure I could find enough space to store the boxes. Bonus, I found a bunch of empty boxes, which means I'll come close to being able box them all after all.
I've done all the work so far. Two more days of boxing, and I'm pretty tired. Come Sunday evening, I'm hoping that Dylan and Sabrina can get some friends to come and help and they can haul all the boxes downstairs.
I'm going to watch. I'm too old for this shit.
Anyway, poking my head into the boxes of stuff. Found hundreds of toys--mostly one-ups, mostly toys that are the only toy in a series that no one wanted, mostly damaged. Nevertheless, there are undoubtedly treasures down there but no way to know without spending way too much time researching.
And even if they are worth money, I don't sell online, no time or interest in developing that, and besides whenever I did it in the past, it proved to be not worth the time and effort.
So I thought I had maybe 100 boxes of comics, 300 comics apiece. Turns out, including comics upstairs, I probably have 200 boxes. There is a bunch of space in them, say 25%--so more like 150 boxes.
Wow. All of them basically unsaleable.
Everyone but everyone doubts me when I say that. Believe me, I've tried. There aren't any hidden prizes down there. (Well, maybe there are but see above note about toys...) They are almost all midlist titles or below. The Spider-mans and Batmans are mostly gone.
Add to the downstairs menagerie are all kinds of goofy things from 35 years of business, again no doubt of interest to someone but who?
Here's the thing--there simply is no cost-effective way to match the product with the person who might be interested. I have tens of thousands of sports cards, hundreds of boxes of books, tens of thousands of non-sport cards, hundred of incomplete sets, and so on. If I could get the technical value of them--say in a price guide, both comics and cards--I'd be rich.
I not only can't get that, I can't really get but pennies on the dollar, and I got better things to do. The store upstairs is doing well. I can get keystone for my efforts instead of pennies.
I found a couple dozen toys worth saving and brought them upstairs. The rest is junk.
I know some of you are thinking that you could dive into that stuff and make use of it. I assure you that everyone who has ever tried has been defeated.
Cherry-picking maybe, but screw that. If this chaos is ever going to be worth selling to someone, I can't have people cherry-picking. I allowed people to go down there for more years than I should have with the caveat that they wouldn't cherry-pick.
Everyone but everyone said they wouldn't cherry-pick and everyone but everyone cherry--picked. So I put an end to it.
It kills me to know that someone with limitless energy, time, and resourcefulness could probably make use of this stuff, that person ain't me or anyone I know. (I know you're thinking you could do it, but believe me...probably not...)
It's fun at first and then you just get tangle up in it and realize, oh my God, I could spend the rest of my life down here and never get it in order. Heh.
It's a bit like an abandoned goldmine. There comes a time when it costs more money to extract the gold than the gold is worth.
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Semi long time reader here...have you thought about donating your unwanted-unsalable comics to the troops?
I did that a number of years ago with the bulk of my small collection. They were just sitting there gathering dust, I had bagged and boarded them after reading them once, mainly because I hate throwing stuff like that out. The missus got tired of seeing the boxes, and the ones I had didn't have any real value. There was a collection event locally and I took them by, they were very happy to have them and were surprised I wanted to let them go to some people who might get better use out of them than sitting on a shelf.
try operation gratitude, I'm not sure if it was the same one that was here locally, but they send care packages to troops and first responders as well.
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