|
Let's forget for a moment that it is a massively flawed comparison given that one is a high priced luxury item and one is a toy affordable by anyone with a job or welfare check...
What killed the beanie babies was the internet.
In the olden days if you were a model train, toy or coin collector you had local shows, maybe a quarterly newsletter and maybe an annual price guide based on sketchy information. You had to guess at overall rarity, demand and reasonable prices.
Today you can instantly know how many of a given type are on the market, what they are selling for, see pictures of condition and much more. I am not a big toy train guy but have a pre-WWII Lionel that I inherited. In the 1980's a price guide would have called it $10,000. Then one showed up on Antiques Road Show, they started coming out of attics, and then Ebay came along and it becomes clear they aren't all that rare and suddenly it's $3500.
The recent Rolex spike is all well after those technology developments. Yes, Instagram fuels it but it hasn't been the technology revolution that spanned the beanie craze.
Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk
|