“Boxes Should Catch Your Attention” - Daryle Lambert

Photo thanks to www.landofmarbles.com

This is the time for spring cleaning and almost everything is subject to being put in a garage sale. Believe it or not when I attend one of these sales the first things I look for are boxes, hopefully with the content inside. It really makes very little difference to me what the item is because by being in the box it is worth several times what it would be worth without the box.

To give you just a few examples of what I'm talking about. I found a great tin Japanese toy from the 50's. I bought it for $5 and was very pleased with the selling price of over $250. I knew, however, Ithat this very piece in the box at auction had sold for over $2500. You can bet I tore that sale apart looking for the box but it was nowhere to be found. How many times have you gone to a sale and there were jars of marbles being sold for a couple of dollars? Well if you were lucky enough to find a box with the original graphics on it and it contained marbles that came in it you would be looking at several thousand dollars. You have heard me talk about lead soldiers . They can bring as much as a couple of hundred dollars if they are the right ones but even the common soldiers will bring a few dollars. But what a difference a box can make? Some of these soldier sets in the original boxes sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

I hope you remember that even if the contents are missing, the boxes alone can make you a very proud owner. Just think, the contents can usually be found but the boxes are much more difficult to come by. If you have the box then search for the content and together they may very well equal a real treasure.

This reminds me of the games at McDonald's. You can play their game “Monopoly” and almost every piece is very easy to find, except Boardwalk. I am very sure that they made very few of these and they are spread across the country. McDonald's knows that these are very hard to come by and because of the fact that not everyone plays the game, these pieces might very easily be thrown away. Wouldn't it be fun to know how much money they actually give away? You see the boxes are like Boardwalk. Most got thrown away so there are very few to be found and even then, there are only a few people that know their value. I want you to be one of those that can spot these diamonds in the rough.

Knowing what other don't is what separates the successful from the also runs in the Antique and Collectible business and I want to make sure that all the members of the 31 Club are winners.

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