How much to sell my collection of over 100 TY Beanie Babies for?

Valli

Another use for smaller soft toys would be the charities which send shoeboxes abroad. I know that, at the warehouse local to me, they check boxes and it is sometimes necessary to add things; small, clean safe soft toys are one thing they often have to add.

WeAreGhosts

campdave wrote: »

Charities are charities, and not recycling services. If I have an item that after several years I cannot sell, it is unlikely a charity shop can sell it either. It is then my responsibility to dispose of it, not to chuck it in a bag and give it to a charity shop to do it for me.

Oxfam can use clothing 'tat' to make carpet underlay or mattress fillings. I think it works out at 97% of all stock donated is used in some way. The remaining 3% is usually donated stuff that they don't actually take in the first place but has been dumped on their doorstep.

makeyourdaddyproud

How come beanies have slumped in value so much? I thought the older they became, the more valuable they would be as fewer and fewer are around. What has caused this?

Pierre_De_Grenoble

over hyped - over produced & changes in taste...

makeyourdaddyproud wrote: »

How come beanies have slumped in value so much? I thought the older they became, the more valuable they would be as fewer and fewer are around. What has caused this?

RFW

makeyourdaddyproud wrote: »

How come beanies have slumped in value so much? I thought the older they became, the more valuable they would be as fewer and fewer are around. What has caused this?

Ebay. Ebay made it easy for people to find things. Before Ebay some things were hard to get, now any collector can find anything quite quickly across the world. Beanie babies are relatively inexpensive to post too, so the market can be swamped with just a few for sale around the world.

makeyourdaddyproud

RFW wrote: »

Ebay. Ebay made it easy for people to find things. Before Ebay some things were hard to get, now any collector can find anything quite quickly across the world. Beanie babies are relatively inexpensive to post too, so the market can be swamped with just a few for sale around the world.

I see. So the mere sight of several pages of listings is enough in itself to tell a collector there's always supply, but before the internet, value was in perceived rarity?

This point fails though if you were to look for, say, Clarice Cliff pieces - which also shows many listings, yet prices are very high??

And these ceramics were cheap before the internet too?

soolin

makeyourdaddyproud wrote: »

I see. So the mere sight of several pages of listings is enough in itself to tell a collector there's always supply, but before the internet, value was in perceived rarity?

This point fails though if you were to look for, say, Clarice Cliff pieces - which also shows many listings, yet prices are very high??

And these ceramics were cheap before the internet too?

Clarice Cliff has never been cheap, even when brand new it was a premium item. Some China has devalued but I don't think it is eBay, just fashion. I love Wedgwood jasper ware but nowadays you literally cannot give it away, and as for Royal Doulton ladies they have dropped like a stone.

Beanie babies were always a hype, Ty sold them as investments , books were written about them and there were even monthly magazines with 'price guides' but it was all just hype. As a dealer and a sci if nut I am still occasionally asked if I can help someone sell their collections and I always refuse . People , including some I know very well, scrimped and scraped and went without to buy a piece of merchandise that they believed would make them a fortune later, now they are faced with storage lockers and lofts full of items that won't even make back a tenth of what they originally paid. Someone i knew went without lunches at work for almost a month to buy a bit of merchandise that he truly believed would be his pension when he got older, he was upset to say the least when I got an identical item in a mixed box at auction valued at pennies.

RFW

makeyourdaddyproud wrote: »

I see. So the mere sight of several pages of listings is enough in itself to tell a collector there's always supply, but before the internet, value was in perceived rarity?

This point fails though if you were to look for, say, Clarice Cliff pieces - which also shows many listings, yet prices are very high??

And these ceramics were cheap before the internet too?

As Soolin says (who has way more experience in collectables than me), also as far as I know, Clarice Cliff has a range of products, from unique items, made/signed by Clarice Cliff to more mass produced products. There are still some Beanie Babies that will fetch a good price, just not as many.
Markets in collectables can be fickle, someone/something can create a buzz around something that artificially inflates the price. It's not just collectables either, this time last year people were fighting to buy loom bands, now they're fighting to give them away.

Brooker_Dave

custardy wrote: »

Well that depends on your definition of wasted I suppose.

Our local charity shop seems to sell (give?) vast quantites of junk to the textile/electrical recycling company who if the side of their lorry is to believed are buyers of all kinds of rubbish.

soolin

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

Our local charity shop seems to sell (give?) vast quantites of junk to the textile/electrical recycling company who if the side of their lorry is to believed are buyers of all kinds of rubbish.

When I sold books I used to have an arrangement with a charity shop that I could go in to their stock room and take whatever books I wanted for 3p a book, I did very well out of it. The ones I didn't want tended to go and be pulped.

The local hospice shop had the same arrangement with a dealer I knew at the time, except he got 1p a book offered but had to take them basically by weight , unsorted.