Local Shows: Buying in Bulk

While you can get almost anything you want from any of a thousand online sites these days, there's no substitute for walking into a local stamp show where you've known the guys for decades and looking through their hoards.  Here is a bin full of stamps I got today:

Everything in here was mint never hinged complete sets.  Individual glassines boasted catalog values of $45 or $70 or more.  Even if it was all $5 to $10 items, wow, look at the quantity.

I suppose that the seller didn't want to put the time into this batch.  It will take time to check the catalog prices and numbers and scan them all, and post them to some site, but the sales will trickle in for years to come.  

Maybe the seller bought it from someone else for $180 and just marked up the price.  That's a good move.  No need to do all the work to get every penny out of it, just take a bonus now and move on to other items.  

Either way, we had fun doing a preliminary run through it.  My strategy for selling it would be to run through and find items listed at over $10 and process all of those first.  Then I might go back and sort them all by country and put together batches of all the Israel MNH sets on a stock page, all the Aruba MNH sets on a stock page, and so on.  Not every listing needs a specific catalog price.  Sometimes, let the buyer see if they spot anything.  I'd rather get $5 for a stock page of items than spend and extra hour cataloguing every little item only to maybe only sell one set for $3.50 while the other 90% go nowhere.