When the time comes to sell....
So this is a question thats recently come up for me. I've been living in a really spacious place for several years but a recent downsize in living conditions is forcing me to sell off a really large amount of my various toy and pop culture collectibles. Not for money but for enough space to be able to walk around in my own house haha. In a way it's helped me to prioritize things cause I've realized that it's impossible to go through life owning as much crap as I do. It's not cool when your possesions own you!
This got me to thinking though, as I've been prioritizing the things that I felt were worth keeping, I've narrowed it down to a few of my collections but one that I just never see myself getting rid of is my NES collection. I'm getting so close to having a compelete licenesed set and after all the years its taken me to do it, naturally I wouldn't want to part with it. Inevitably though you can't keep your stuff forever so when we all reach that stage where we can no longer keep our NES collections what do you do?
As an occasional ebay seller I think I can probably speak for everyone when I say it's a huge pain in the ass, between ebay taking a listing fee, a final value fee, and a paypal fee. Then you have to deal with individually packaging/addressing and shipping out each game, which means gas, time waiting in the post office, etc. On the other hand, the whole fun of collecting afterall is to "collect" so nobody is going to want to buy the whole library of games for five grand or more (there's numerous attempted auctions that prove this). So what do you do with them all? You ever notice when you are buying things they are worth a ton of money but when you want to get rid of them with the exception of the obvious (SE, Flintstones2, NWC, etc) you feel like you practically can't give them away?
So when/if the day comes, how do you go about getting rid of your collection?
Comments
Have you considered a storage unit for to keep your extras?
That's where the picture in my avatar was taken...the storage unit currently hosing the majority of my NES collection :-(
You can try trading them into a game store.
That would all depend. This is of course hypothetical so by the time I get around to selling my NES games they could be worth a lot more, or be worth nothing. Either way though a game store would either not take them (game stop) or offer you like .10 a game (play n trade) so it's kind of a toss up.
Classic and current VG expos, including computer shows
Anime conventions
Toy and hobby shows, including ball card and comic cons. At ball card cons, fathers ALWAYS bring lots of kids.
Put price tags on stuff that are a good percentage of what you paid on each item, but let it be a bit of a bargain. Don't fire-sale stuff because you'll bring two signs with you.
For the first two hours of each con, let stuff sell. Chat around, get people interested. If people want to haggle, your prices are "good" enough you've got some wiggle room.
After two hours, put up your sign that says "25% off all items listed prices, EVERYTHING MUST GO TODAY" and tell people your space downsizing story. They'll eat it up.
Then, after two more hours, just when the bulk of people will be thinking about leaving because the best deals have been snapped up, put out your "50% FINAL DISCOUNT, I'm packing up and leaving shortly" sign.
Then after you've sold all you can, find another expo and repeat with your same original price tags.
No fees apart from the table fees (which at least for smaller expos can be very reasonable) and it only costs you gas. Plus you get to hang out at expos. If you don't like anime, just ogle at all of the cute girls in ridiculously skimpy outfits while you make money.
Good luck, the alternatives, as you pointed out, aren't pretty. This stuff is tough to give away, and you certainly don't want to photo-document and describe everything, even in a text-forum like this.
Just box it up and try to survive until you move somewhere bigger.