good stuff is an anomalous term, but I would say my meaning is better quality material by value and demand.
getting back to the main point though, movie posters have widely ranging values depending on where they are being sold and by whom. Some places are a race to the top, others are a race to the bottom. Using one or the other exclusively in pricing is a failure to understand the vagaries of the market or the different markets there are.
No doubt, Cinemasterpieces and Posteritati have some of the higher retail pricing structure, but the success of both companies speaks to how pricing structures work in those different markets, but here is the key to both - they put an item in stock, list it at a price and patiently wait for a sale. This is the opposite of what goes on in most auctions, where the end is nigh and whomever is available to bid on such and such a day is the arbiter of the price on that day.
Let me posit this as an automobile business. Now cars do indeed have a blue book and a red book price (retail/wholesale) and they do have car auctions every day somewhere. I'm talking repo, confiscation, abandonment, police, bank etc auctions, not high-end car auctions. Consumers are in general not allowed to participate in most auto auction venues without a resale & business license. Ergo, the consumer does not get to share in the wholesale market in general. The participants are retailers who then sell the cars at blue book to consumers.
This is not so in movie poster auctions, where anyone can bid without restraints (other than their own wallets) and no such blue book price exists. As a matter of fact, movie posters is one of the only collectible markets I can think of that doesn't have a price guide, largely because we are all resistant to such a book. I'm not advocating for one either.
what I am basically saying is this: just because one venue sells tons of posters for dirt prices, does not mean that those are the retail values or the standard values for these items. If that was the case, everywhere you go, you would see these posters for the same cheap prices and Pulp Fiction one sheets would always be priced at $600. We know that the PF's are more often priced from 200-350. But when commenting on prices or pricing posters for sale OR when considering to bid, many people only look at the lowest prices and others only look at the highest prices with each group discounting the other side of the results. I can even change that to "when evaluating, many people only consider what the lowest prices achieved have been when they are bidders but only consider the highest prices achieved when they are sellers". It is a common philosophy
Frequently, people make absolutist claims when talking about material sold in the market "oh that only sells for $5 on the one venue, so the fact that everyone else gets $50 is meaningless and that you paid $50 when the other guy gets $5 means you're uneducated" but that brand of absolutism is a failure as few things are such absolutes, especially in collectibles and most especially in the movie poster market.
I actually think the Market is getting smaller, and the prices are slowly dropping. However the best people to answer this question are dealers, as they must know how their business is doing..
Whenever I talk to my bricks and mortar dude, he's always complaining that lately and more often when he gets offered a collection. There is less and less good gear around. It's like the person who's offering their collection still holds on to the pricey stuff.
Me thinks the internet is educating those people on prices and availability.
The problem is who people are using as the benchmark for pricing, eBay who by our calculations churn through an estimated 250,000 posters per annum seems to be what a lot of people think is the benchmark yet as we know the prices are so wild and varied that obviously eBay is providing a false sense of reality. Their size is now getting in the way of reality.
Let's says Bruce sells 100,000 posters per annum it is probably reasonable to say he gets repeats customers because he is really catering to the collector; say the average person buys 20 posters per year, that's only 5,000 buyers. I'd bet eBay is providing a far greater volume of buyers because not all are collectors, many are just buying a poster - there could be as many as 50,000 buyers, (an average buy of 5 posters each per year).
Now look at what happens to that 5,000 collectors that Bruce caters for, less than 10% actually 'talk' to each other in terms of keeping the hobby alive whether on MoPo, VMP, APF, MPF or NS4 - that's less than 500 people congregating to discuss, disseminate and foster the hobby. Most are simply closet collectors and as a result there is no real education of people on price and other items such as restoration etc etc.
The hobby is in danger of killing itself off because the bigger eBay gets the less 'real' the hobby will be.
I actually think the Market is getting smaller, and the prices are slowly dropping. However the best people to answer this question are dealers, as they must know how their business is doing..
I think the hobby is growing and is very healthy. Prices will always be affected by what is available at the time. There are many cases where one poster was considered particularly rare and it was priced accordingly. However, someone has later turned up a quantity of them and unloaded them onto the market quickly. Consequently, the price falls dramatically. This will continue to happen as more and more collections surface.
I'm finding that there are a lot of new collectors who are interested in posters from films that they can remember or identify with - 80s posters are becoming a lot more popular. There is not as much interest in some of the older titles, particularly westerns.
Bruce once quoted someone who called it the 30 year rule - 30 years after you saw it as a teen etc you are old enough to reminisce and afford the poster
I think that is quite true for Oz John, I've never seen so many Australian posters for sale, and as much as the 80's thing is a peak here too, I feel there's less people buying in the U.K. than say 5-10 years back...
Bruce once quoted someone who called it the 30 year rule - 30 years after you saw it as a teen etc you are old enough to reminisce and afford the poster
Hmm I'm 30 and mainly collect 30s, 40s and 50s stuff. I must be eccentric..
Comments
getting back to the main point though, movie posters have widely ranging values depending on where they are being sold and by whom.
Some places are a race to the top, others are a race to the bottom. Using one or the other exclusively in pricing is a failure to understand the vagaries of the market or the different markets there are.
No doubt, Cinemasterpieces and Posteritati have some of the higher retail pricing structure, but the success of both companies speaks to how pricing structures work in those different markets, but here is the key to both - they put an item in stock, list it at a price and patiently wait for a sale. This is the opposite of what goes on in most auctions, where the end is nigh and whomever is available to bid on such and such a day is the arbiter of the price on that day.
Let me posit this as an automobile business. Now cars do indeed have a blue book and a red book price (retail/wholesale) and they do have car auctions every day somewhere. I'm talking repo, confiscation, abandonment, police, bank etc auctions, not high-end car auctions. Consumers are in general not allowed to participate in most auto auction venues without a resale & business license. Ergo, the consumer does not get to share in the wholesale market in general. The participants are retailers who then sell the cars at blue book to consumers.
This is not so in movie poster auctions, where anyone can bid without restraints (other than their own wallets) and no such blue book price exists. As a matter of fact, movie posters is one of the only collectible markets I can think of that doesn't have a price guide, largely because we are all resistant to such a book. I'm not advocating for one either.
what I am basically saying is this: just because one venue sells tons of posters for dirt prices, does not mean that those are the retail values or the standard values for these items. If that was the case, everywhere you go, you would see these posters for the same cheap prices and Pulp Fiction one sheets would always be priced at $600. We know that the PF's are more often priced from 200-350. But when commenting on prices or pricing posters for sale OR when considering to bid, many people only look at the lowest prices and others only look at the highest prices with each group discounting the other side of the results. I can even change that to "when evaluating, many people only consider what the lowest prices achieved have been when they are bidders but only consider the highest prices achieved when they are sellers". It is a common philosophy
Frequently, people make absolutist claims when talking about material sold in the market "oh that only sells for $5 on the one venue, so the fact that everyone else gets $50 is meaningless and that you paid $50 when the other guy gets $5 means you're uneducated" but that brand of absolutism is a failure as few things are such absolutes, especially in collectibles and most especially in the movie poster market.
I think the hobby is growing and is very healthy. Prices will always be affected by what is available at the time. There are many cases where one poster was considered particularly rare and it was priced accordingly. However, someone has later turned up a quantity of them and unloaded them onto the market quickly. Consequently, the price falls dramatically. This will continue to happen as more and more collections surface.
I'm finding that there are a lot of new collectors who are interested in posters from films that they can remember or identify with - 80s posters are becoming a lot more popular. There is not as much interest in some of the older titles, particularly westerns.