All that Glitters

All that Glitters

Well, I tried to give away $12,000 today. Sadly, there were no takers. I’ll admit that my methods were not the most straightforward but still I expected at least one person to be willing to help me take the $12,000 from my car and place it in their own.

The attempt to give away the big bucks started with a simple missive:

Addressees,

Before I tell you about the free stuff, I’ll avail myself of the opportunity to bore you with pointless explanatory background.

Some of you may be aware that I’ve been wasting my free time for the last 15 years or so selling trading cards on the internet. That tiny fraction of you who regularly read my blog are also aware that due to a felicitous convergence of serendipity and human reason I’ve recently stopped that insanity and now enjoy my free time as god intended, watching reruns of the Muppet Show and the Smurfs on DVD. That Gargamel, how unsmurfular can you get?

What, you may well be asking yourself, does this mean to me and is he really watching the Smurfs? Well, I’ll tell you. Not quickly, but I’ll eventually get to it. As a result of these last 15 years I have accumulated thousands of these blasted cards. I’m not talking, “Pile these all into your car at once and drive to a nearby lake and dump them right in” thousands either. I’m talking, “Isn’t this amount of weight going to do something bad to the floor of your house?” thousands and frankly I’m sick of them.

And now the part you’ve been waiting for: the Free Stuff. Obviously enough, the free stuff is the cards themselves. Right now, I’ve got about 25,000 mostly Basketball (a small number of Golf and Hockey included as well) that I’m ready to just be rid of. The price for the items is that you need to help me carry them from My vehicle and place them into Your vehicle. After that, godspeed to you and your new friends. If more than one person is interested, it’s worth noting that the 25,000 cards will come in 5 boxes of about (get out your pocket calculators) 5,000 cards each. That works out to about 25lbs per box. Simple math reveals that I can accommodate up to 5 interested parties or possibly more if they bring their ability to negotiate and storage containers of some sort.

That’s it. Anyone who’s interested drop me a line and I can have them in the parking lot before the quarterly meeting today. Also feel free to pass this along to anyone I’ve missed who you think might be interested; I didn’t want to blast the whole office.

PS: Sadly, only the original French version of the Smurfs is out on DVD. So no, I don’t watch the Smurfs but I am considering learning French.

I sent this rather murky correspondence to eight people within my immediate work environment. One I knew to be an automatic ‘no, thanks’ but among the other seven I expected at least one to either want or know of someone who wanted at least a box. Sadly, I received for my trouble one vague but ultimately unsuccessful lead, one person who was too sick to respond, four who provided only the unequivocal ‘no, thanks’ and two who apparently didn’t actually make it far enough into the notice to know what it was that was being offered for free. Obviously, the uninterested can’t be faulted, especially since they have the good sense to not want the stupid things any more than I do. Bravo for the uninterested. Those who didn’t make it through leave me wondering if perhaps my use of the vernacular is simply insufficient to transmit the premise in question. Praps I need me one of dem dar rightin classes at the universe-T.

Aside from the annoying fact that I’ve got 125 pounds of cards in the back of my vehicle now, it’s also interesting to note that someone writing a price guide has really gotten their cipherin’ turned the wrong direction. The foremost authority on trading cards and their market values is a publishing company by the name of ‘Beckett’s.’ They publish pricing on every kind of trading card imaginable from 1909 Cy Young baseball cards to Pokemon. According to their price guides, the lot I just tried to give away has a total market value of just over $12,000. Sadly, this is a bunch of crap.

Even the local purveyors of such tripe won’t touch such a lot. It’s not worth their time to attempt to sell such stuff so the real collectable value of the lot is therefore $0. The sample at work proves the other half of the equation. There’s also no perceived capitalized value so the real worth of this lot is exactly nothing. Now I realize that Beckett’s prices are intended to reflect ‘retail’ values but there always has to be some non-zero conversion factor between ‘retail’ and ‘wholesale.’ Companies cannot buy inventory at $0 and turn it around at a profit. Everything has some cost.

Summarily, this is a sad reality of the collectables market. All these items from antiques to sports cards that have some ‘theoretical’ value are in reality worthless. They exist in a sort of pricing limbo; they’re worth only what one person considers their worth at the exact moment they’re for sale. Could be $1000, could be nothing. This insanity of uncertainty is exactly the reason I’ve finally managed to talk myself out of this greed in my soul to obtain, acquire and accumulate. Everything is worthless garbage. Unless you can write on it, read it, use it to cut the grass or cook your dinner with it, everything you own is completely without value. Everything. Those beanie babies. Garbage. Those books you never read. Garbage. No utility, no value. All garbage. Every sad little scrap of it. Is it too late in the year to have a really big gar(b)age sale?