Bubbles

Hobby resolutions: focus on collecting/upgrading the dogs, upgrading my pre-Reeves Proud Arabians, and completing the Roemer collection; finish sorting and archiving the latest ephemera acquisitions; and finally, doing a 5 percent herd reduction for space reasons.

That last item might not sound like much, but that will cull about 100 pieces from the collection, mostly Traditionals and Classics. (No Stablemates! I can hide those anywhere.)

I got home late from work yesterday, and I’ve spent most of my day off sorting through my giant box of unfinished sewing projects (another resolution), so the Glacier who arrived yesterday will not get his glorious unveiling until Monday at the earliest.

Though I’m a little scared to even open him up, at this point. Not out of possible disappointment - that's an uncomfortably narrow box he's in - but because of the prices realized by a couple of them on eBay this week.

I’ll be up front with y’all and confess that I come from a working class background: my family thinks splurging on an occasional Big Gulp and a bag of Doritos is wanton excess. Investing more than $250 on any model makes me uneasy, even if I know it is worth more - or will be in the future.

And I’ve also spent a lot of time at flea markets, yard sales, estate sales and antique shops, and I’ve seen the fallout of collectible "investment" bubbles everywhere, new and old.

The current prices for Glacier are part of a bubble. That bubble will pop soon, if it hasn’t already, but it will leave us with a legacy of Glaciers listed at hyperinflated prices for a while.

The 1984 Just About Horses Saddlebred Weanling was like that for a long time. Because of the flawed way they were distributed (by mail, and not limited to one per person), it created a lot of frustrated demand. The prices at one point reached the $200-350 level - and that was in the late 1980s and early 1990s!

I went without one for years (decades, actually) until the prices finally dropped to the $100 level, which seemed more reasonable and fair for a Special Run model with a 1000 piece run and some historical significance.

Prices will come down, eventually, because they have to. The hobby does not have enough hobbyists at that income or intensity level to sustain them.  The handful of buyers who can afford them don't want them or already have them, and the buyers who do want them can't afford them - or justify the purchase financially.

It might take a while; we've all seen certain models on eBay and MH$P that have been there for years. (In some of my more annoyed moments, I find myself gesticulating at the screen and yelling "Just cut the darn price and let it go, already!")

Glaciers will never be "cheap" - he was a 40 piece Special Run, in a popular Decorator color, on a mold with very few releases - but they’ll become affordable. Or at least, not unimaginably unattainable. (Still waiting for that moment on Marshall, probably in vain. Alas!)