Recently I discovered Airline travel posters of the 1950s and 1960s. These were
made by the airlines and displayed in travel agencies. They make for a perfect
collectible, because, like movies posters, they were NEVER available to the
general public (only people in the travel business got them) and 99.9% of them
were displayed as intended, so they were taped to walls and likely almost all
were thrown away after usage.
The best collectibles are items that were not at all valued when they were
created, and the WORST collectibles are items (like limited edition books or
prints or coins or dolls) that were highly priced when they were created, for
those items almost NEVER appreciate in value (and the vast majority of those
items sell for a fraction of their original price).
So I decided to buy 200 or more of these travel posters, and then either keep
them as a collection (they look really cool framed together in a group on one
wall!) or re-sell them somewhere down the line. Over the past three months or
so I have purchased around 200 or so of these travel posters, mostly from three
distinct types of sellers:
1) Former travel agents (or their children) who have lots of these posters
2) Individuals who have stumbled on one or two of these
3) Isoldit type stores who received one or two of these from the #2 type above
I purchased from around 75 different sellers. THEIR PACKING RANGED FROM BARELY
OK TO DREADFUL! There was not one who packed really well. LOTS of them simply
rolled the poster and put it loose in a triangular free priority tube, and in
lots of cases the ends of the posters became crinkled and/or the triangular
tube became slightly bent down the center, thus putting a crease down the
middle of the posters.
There is no point in my putting in insurance claims, as the Post Office would
declare them poorly packed, and anyway I would feel guilty collecting insurance
when it WAS the fault of poor packaging.
I also won't leave negatives, for I would surely get many retaliatory
negatives. But once feedback 2.0 is in place, these types of sellers will
surely get low grades from me (most of the posters were purely described, and
many had undisclosed defects).
I used to buy lots of posters on eBay (around 50 different purchases a week,
and I am sure many MoPo sellers remember that because I used to buy from them
regularly!) but I quit cold around 3 years ago, SPECIFICALLY over the crappy
packing and describing issues.
I thought I would give buying another try, hoping things had improved over the
past 3 years, but they do not seem to have improved at all, at least not among
sellers of travel posters.
I will suspend my buying until feedback 2.0 is in place and then I will only
buy from sellers who get good ratings (and who seem to sell enough that they
should have some idea of what they are doing). I KNOW that unknown sellers
often have the very best deals, but the risk of bad packaging and/or condition
description is just more than I enjoy dealing with (although I can well
understand others not minding the risk).
Thoughts?
Bruce
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