Down at SANDIPEX again

We had a table at the Sandipex show again, down in Poway.  We don't have a van, or whole shelves of red boxes to bring.  I do have a knack for knowing what will fit into any space, so we set aside exactly enough plastic bins and boxes to fill my Toyota Corolla, and it turned out to be the perfect amount to spread out and cover the three tables.

Here's a look at it:

Anne and Dory were there helping out.

It's funny how many different ways there are to collect things, and at least as many different ways to buy them.  We had some binders and folders full of country collections.  I sold one of my Dad's old half-empty volumes of USA for $100, a big binder of Norway (1966-2005) for $50, and other collections of Belgian Congo, Senegal and others.  When I price these, I am not going to sit there for hours writing every catalog value on the margin of every page: they're almost all going to be under a buck anyway.  I save a lot of time by just doing a count and eyeballing the value at 8 cents to 12 cents each.  Priced to sell.  750 Hungary = $50, whatever.  I can guarantee there are a few $3 or $4 items in those, but if I do all that time and get an "exact value" of $552, I would then figure nobody's going to pay more than 10-15% and end up at the same price anyway.  Except that I would have wasted hours.

In other bins we had a lot of country mixtures, on and off paper at good prices.  The highlights were mixtures of modern (1990s to 2010s) issues from Latin America that I found last year, and have been selling ever since.  Those are so uncommon in bulk that I never had a reason to even look at the catalogs for those years for those countries.  I have since sold well over 100 lots from that batch on HipStamp.

We also brought a table full of box lots this time: "Big box of worldwide - $50", "Cigar box hoard - $25", two boxes of about 2000 world postmarks at $40 per box.  Even a whole under-the-bed bin of WW covers for $150.  Things we thought people would enjoy picking through when they got home.  None of the box lots sold.

Part of the logic of bringing these heavier items here is that I used to sell box lots and mixtures all the time, but shipping has become so expensive and complicated, I just don't want the hassle of shipping anything over an ounce or two anymore.  If someone walks out with four or five binders of stuff they're looking for, it's a savings of $20-30 shipping.  I don't get lectured by the guy at the postal counter (where every clerk seems to have their own version of the rules these days), and I don't have to grumble back about how stupidly complicated they've made everything and how whole categories of mail-order businesses have been destroyed by those costs and changes.

When I do find sets or singles for $5 to $100 or more, those go on HipStamp.  They're easy to ship.

One other way the customers want to buy their stamps is to look through boxes and stockbooks at 10 cents each.  Half the dealers have a stack of 10-cent stuff, and there's always someone at the end of their table, picking.  We had a guy spend literally his whole trip to the show at our table, and he was still counting his goodies as we were reloading the car.  4 hours of picking to find 297 stamps.  We rounded off to $25.

We do like to round off prices to avoid dealing with too much change, and just to give good deals.  It's funny how someone will flip through a book with maybe $400 catalog value that they're obviously interested in, only to put it down when it comes to paying $25 for it.  So I say $20 and they take it.  It's a good vibe for everyone involved. 

The strangest encounter we had was with a lady who was looking for stamps for crafting projects.  She makes nice little bookmarks showcasing 4 or 5 stamps front and back, with a little tassel.  It turns out, we had what was left of Anne's Etsy shop, where we tried posting stamps for crafting, sometimes 100 of one QEII stamps, sometimes a packet of all brown stamps.  As crafts, you need to be color driven.  It was such a funny match that we had $25 of what she was looking for, and she got to go home with a few thousand more common stamps to work on for her hobby.

At the end of these shows, there's always a bit of time where you can get great deals on whole boxes full because as we usually say, "That way we don't have to haul it back out to the car."  So I bought a few items.  I've known these dealers for decades and we do try to stash away things for each other.  One guy had some good bulk mixes that were underpriced -- one of them was a batch of modern Ireland for $3, which I swapped for a label saying $6 and threw it right in my box of mixtures ... someone had asked for an Ireland mix earlier and I was out of them.  I also got a batch of about 1100 Russia covers (1950s-60s) for $100 ... one less thing he had to load up, and lots for me to go through for future shows and online lots.  All good deals.