Daytrading toy soldiers pt 1 of 2
I ran across some of my toys from my childhood, stored in boxes under the bed and in the closet of the spare room of my parents' place. Most of my childhood things were destroyed in a fire a couple decades ago, but some toys and papers somehow survived. It was a trip through memory lane. Matchbox cars, crafted animals, school projects, some old lego blocks, remnants of some plastic models. Among the boxes were sets of plastic toy soldiers of different sizes.
One of the most famous lines in the history of movies is in the Graduate when a family friend, Mr. McGuire, provides counsel to the young confused Benjamin Braddock played by Dustin Hoffman. The reader doubtless is shouting out the magic word as he/she reads this: Plastics. Mr. McGuire’s suggestion for Benjamin’s future was correct, as the metal and wooden toys available when my brother and to a lesser extent I were boys have been replaced by plastic toys. Today metal toys are more upscale, not meant for play by children but for cataloging and display by adult collectors while the wooden toys, also upscale, are limited to structured play by future high achievers between music lessons and soccer practice. But plastic made possible endless creation by molding toys of every kind in quantities undreamed of by metal and wooden toy manufacturers. Plastic toy soldiers flooded the toy aisles and basements of America when I was a kid. And they made up half my stuff found at my folks’ place.
There were a fair number of boxes, and as my wife and I live in a row house, I considered how to get rid of some of the stuff so as not to crowd an already crowded basement stuffed with two adults’ accumulation of assorted boxes of crap (ok, most of them were mine from my days as a teacher and graduate student, files and books that will most likely never see light of day but must be preserved long after any possible use.). I gave some toy cars and trucks to my wife’s brother’s children. Some things I kept, to preserve my packrat persona. There were still lots of things that I didn’t want to keep nor did I want to just throw away.
My pedestrian friendly neighborhood has a healthy tradition of reuse: if you put anything remotely useful out by the sidewalk on a Friday afternoon, it will be gone by Sunday evening. We discovered that upon clearing the house of items left behind by previous owner as well as some unwanted or duplicate items of our own. Anyone needs a book shelf, a picture frame, old kitchen items, a lamp. They disappear quickly. Not many folk need a box of one inch British Paratroops. You can’t drop them off with clothes for the homeless, as notices outside churches rarely read “Gloves, hats, and German Afrika Korps soldiers urgently needed.” There is only one place that such things are needed, traded, coveted: ebay.
Ebay, the great guerilla liberation army of retail. With the growth of large retail chains, the range of what a person can buy is confined to what these chains deem worthy for consumers. Whether it’s clothing, technology, housewares, anything, if the major chains consider it sellable, then it is available in identical variety at all retail venues. Even the range of toys in a large toy store is remarkably limited. If a child wants a train, there are lots of Thomas the train sets and other similar wooden brands to be found. Dolls are toy tie-ins with Disney movies, action toys are Star Wars merchandise, even Legos are now tie-ins with Harry Potter (I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies several times. I never noticed a single Lego block in any of them). There are lots of educational toys to provide the buyer the satisfaction of furthering the development of children and to fill the upper shelves of children’s rooms, where they stay, as the kids don’t want to play with them. One must go to the internet to find toys beyond those ranges, and there are indeed specialist sites for assorted hobbies. But, like the fabled bazaars of Timbuktu, Istanbul (not Constantinople) or Delhi, Ebay is our great market place for everything imagined.
Ebay dodges the retail tyranny. Anything is available there. My first foray onto ebay was to buy a gift for my wife, a Washington Nationals Screech Bobble-belly, a promotional item available at one game several years ago. A bobble-belly is like a bobble-head, but a belly in this case, as Screech the team mascot would strut about the roof of the dugout with his belly literally bouncing about. Well, until he slimmed down to present a more healthy image for young people attending a baseball game, cruel irony considering the abundant vendors of cotton candy, ice cream, pretzels, hot dogs, beer, fries, sodas. The only other things I ever bought on ebay were a pair of DC bus token cuff links (remember anything is available there).
I looked up the some of the toys I ran across among my things to see what they’d fetch on ebay. Having never been a dedicated collector of anything, I was astounded at what people would pay for a box of toy soldiers bought 35 years ago for 69 cents. Wait for it: up to 25-40 dollars. Now prices of everything have gone up. Gasoline was about 40 cents per gallon then, now it’s 5 to 10 times as much, depending on demand around the world, production from oil fields, and greed of oil companies and oil exporters. Going by that increase, these soldiers should be between $3.50 and $6.90. Not even close. Our next door neighbors bought their house 35 years ago for 17,000 dollars. Now it would go for over 500,000 dollars, a thirty-fold increase. Even at that rate of increase, the toy soldiers would price at 20 dollars. I wondered how it was possible that little plastic soldiers would appreciate better than property in a popular neighborhood in DC.
I started to look up the toys on sites other than ebay. The companies that made the soldiers are frequently defunct or have been bought out during the great sorting and merging of companies during the 1980s. Changing play habits and fluctuating oil prices—oil being main ingredient of plastics—caused the demise of many brands also. Some websites sell assorted plastic models and soldiers, which is no surprise. Though the web can provide anything, it makes perfect sense that toy soldiers are available online: a) limited market with a low inventory turnover and b) the web was originally developed by geeks for geeks so it was natural that items coveted by geeks would be available online. My favorite site I discovered selling toy soldiers was toysoldierhq. The guy running the site provides photos of the amazing array of toy soldiers available. The market seemed to have expanded significantly since I was kid.
When I was young, toys soldiers available seemed to be, in order of decreasing popularity, WWII, Waterloo, WWI, American Civil War, Cowboys and Indians, Foreign Legion and Arabs. In the 60s and 70s, everyone had a relative who had served in the second world war or perhaps the first world war in some way, so the influence is obvious there. Since the common source of the soldiers was a British firm, Airfix, the English triumph over Napoleon was represented (The triumph of Russia over the Napoleon was not commemorated by toy Russian soldiers in the west until after the Berlin wall came down). Anybody who has lived in the southern US knows the most significant historic event there since the creation (about 6000 years ago according to many down there) was the civil war, hence the soldiers for the market down south. Looking at popular action and adventure movies of the 50s and 60s, the presence of cowboys and Indians and their equivalents in North Africa, the Foreign Legion and Arabs is no surprise. The range has widened considerably since.
The hobby shops websites and the sales website mentioned above provided many examples of what was available, but I gradually ran across sites for displaying and discussing toy soldiers, not selling them. Websites dedicated to different brands of soldiers. Several for soldiers about one inch high, about the scale of HO train sets. One site, plastic soldier review, provides reviews, as well-written and pithy as New Yorker magazine movie reviews, of toy soldier sets. There are over 60 different sets of German soldiers from the second world war, all extensively evaluated with photos and commentary. It was on this site I learned the periods for which plastic one inch soldiers are available today:
Ancient World
Republican Rome
Imperial Rome
Late Antiquity
Dark Ages
Medieval Europe
Medieval Asia
Ottoman Empire
Renaissance
Thirty Years War
English Civil War
Early America
Ukrainian Cossack Revolt
Great Northern War
Pirates
War of the Spanish Succession
Jacobite Rebellions
Seven Years War
American War of Independence
French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars
Napoleonic Wars
War of 1812
Carlist Wars
Texan War of Independence
US-Mexican War
Crimean War
Italian Wars of Independence
American Civil War
American Western Frontier
Franco-Prussian War
Zulu Wars
Mahdist Revolt
North-West Frontier (India)
Spanish-American War
Sudan 1898
Second Anglo-Boer War
Boxer Rebellion
French North Africa
Russo-Japanese War
World War I
American Expedition in Mexico 1916
20th Century Revolutions
Russian Civil War
Rif War (1920)
Spanish Civil War
World War II
Korean War
Cold War
Vietnam War
Modern
Not every period or nationality is as heavily represented as Germans of World War II—they are the most popular variety—but there are hundreds of different sets available. It’s as if the cultural variety encouraged in the academy worried with PC and multicultural studies has spread to the world of toy soldiers.
Some sites present pictures of a person’s collection with photographs of rooms full of boxes of soldiers. Some people paint them and put up pictures of dioramas on the web, or post to youtube their videos of battles with toy soldiers. There are forum websites for people to put up pictures and for other enthusiasts to comment on their creations. Articles are written on the histories of different companies, describing the evolution of their packaging, as well as hints for painting and the care of toy soldiers. All these are in addition to and separate from the websites of vendors.
After researching the prices, I put some of my old toys on ebay for auction. Some things did quite well, others didn’t. I found boxes with old model kits I assembled as a child and sold the assembly instructions—not the models themselves, but the instructions—for several dollars each. Some items I priced too high and had to relist, while others had fierce bidding wars.
While searching ebay to figure out how to list the items, I noticed that some items sold for more than the same items, the only difference being the title keywords. If items had the critical words that collectors used to search, they would sell for much more. I made sure the soldiers I sold had all the keywords in their descriptions. On a lark, I tried buying some of the items with general listings and reselling them with the magic words with a mark up in price. I was day-trading toy soldiers.
More Later.
One of the most famous lines in the history of movies is in the Graduate when a family friend, Mr. McGuire, provides counsel to the young confused Benjamin Braddock played by Dustin Hoffman. The reader doubtless is shouting out the magic word as he/she reads this: Plastics. Mr. McGuire’s suggestion for Benjamin’s future was correct, as the metal and wooden toys available when my brother and to a lesser extent I were boys have been replaced by plastic toys. Today metal toys are more upscale, not meant for play by children but for cataloging and display by adult collectors while the wooden toys, also upscale, are limited to structured play by future high achievers between music lessons and soccer practice. But plastic made possible endless creation by molding toys of every kind in quantities undreamed of by metal and wooden toy manufacturers. Plastic toy soldiers flooded the toy aisles and basements of America when I was a kid. And they made up half my stuff found at my folks’ place.
There were a fair number of boxes, and as my wife and I live in a row house, I considered how to get rid of some of the stuff so as not to crowd an already crowded basement stuffed with two adults’ accumulation of assorted boxes of crap (ok, most of them were mine from my days as a teacher and graduate student, files and books that will most likely never see light of day but must be preserved long after any possible use.). I gave some toy cars and trucks to my wife’s brother’s children. Some things I kept, to preserve my packrat persona. There were still lots of things that I didn’t want to keep nor did I want to just throw away.
My pedestrian friendly neighborhood has a healthy tradition of reuse: if you put anything remotely useful out by the sidewalk on a Friday afternoon, it will be gone by Sunday evening. We discovered that upon clearing the house of items left behind by previous owner as well as some unwanted or duplicate items of our own. Anyone needs a book shelf, a picture frame, old kitchen items, a lamp. They disappear quickly. Not many folk need a box of one inch British Paratroops. You can’t drop them off with clothes for the homeless, as notices outside churches rarely read “Gloves, hats, and German Afrika Korps soldiers urgently needed.” There is only one place that such things are needed, traded, coveted: ebay.
Ebay, the great guerilla liberation army of retail. With the growth of large retail chains, the range of what a person can buy is confined to what these chains deem worthy for consumers. Whether it’s clothing, technology, housewares, anything, if the major chains consider it sellable, then it is available in identical variety at all retail venues. Even the range of toys in a large toy store is remarkably limited. If a child wants a train, there are lots of Thomas the train sets and other similar wooden brands to be found. Dolls are toy tie-ins with Disney movies, action toys are Star Wars merchandise, even Legos are now tie-ins with Harry Potter (I’ve read all the books and seen all the movies several times. I never noticed a single Lego block in any of them). There are lots of educational toys to provide the buyer the satisfaction of furthering the development of children and to fill the upper shelves of children’s rooms, where they stay, as the kids don’t want to play with them. One must go to the internet to find toys beyond those ranges, and there are indeed specialist sites for assorted hobbies. But, like the fabled bazaars of Timbuktu, Istanbul (not Constantinople) or Delhi, Ebay is our great market place for everything imagined.
Ebay dodges the retail tyranny. Anything is available there. My first foray onto ebay was to buy a gift for my wife, a Washington Nationals Screech Bobble-belly, a promotional item available at one game several years ago. A bobble-belly is like a bobble-head, but a belly in this case, as Screech the team mascot would strut about the roof of the dugout with his belly literally bouncing about. Well, until he slimmed down to present a more healthy image for young people attending a baseball game, cruel irony considering the abundant vendors of cotton candy, ice cream, pretzels, hot dogs, beer, fries, sodas. The only other things I ever bought on ebay were a pair of DC bus token cuff links (remember anything is available there).
I looked up the some of the toys I ran across among my things to see what they’d fetch on ebay. Having never been a dedicated collector of anything, I was astounded at what people would pay for a box of toy soldiers bought 35 years ago for 69 cents. Wait for it: up to 25-40 dollars. Now prices of everything have gone up. Gasoline was about 40 cents per gallon then, now it’s 5 to 10 times as much, depending on demand around the world, production from oil fields, and greed of oil companies and oil exporters. Going by that increase, these soldiers should be between $3.50 and $6.90. Not even close. Our next door neighbors bought their house 35 years ago for 17,000 dollars. Now it would go for over 500,000 dollars, a thirty-fold increase. Even at that rate of increase, the toy soldiers would price at 20 dollars. I wondered how it was possible that little plastic soldiers would appreciate better than property in a popular neighborhood in DC.
I started to look up the toys on sites other than ebay. The companies that made the soldiers are frequently defunct or have been bought out during the great sorting and merging of companies during the 1980s. Changing play habits and fluctuating oil prices—oil being main ingredient of plastics—caused the demise of many brands also. Some websites sell assorted plastic models and soldiers, which is no surprise. Though the web can provide anything, it makes perfect sense that toy soldiers are available online: a) limited market with a low inventory turnover and b) the web was originally developed by geeks for geeks so it was natural that items coveted by geeks would be available online. My favorite site I discovered selling toy soldiers was toysoldierhq. The guy running the site provides photos of the amazing array of toy soldiers available. The market seemed to have expanded significantly since I was kid.
When I was young, toys soldiers available seemed to be, in order of decreasing popularity, WWII, Waterloo, WWI, American Civil War, Cowboys and Indians, Foreign Legion and Arabs. In the 60s and 70s, everyone had a relative who had served in the second world war or perhaps the first world war in some way, so the influence is obvious there. Since the common source of the soldiers was a British firm, Airfix, the English triumph over Napoleon was represented (The triumph of Russia over the Napoleon was not commemorated by toy Russian soldiers in the west until after the Berlin wall came down). Anybody who has lived in the southern US knows the most significant historic event there since the creation (about 6000 years ago according to many down there) was the civil war, hence the soldiers for the market down south. Looking at popular action and adventure movies of the 50s and 60s, the presence of cowboys and Indians and their equivalents in North Africa, the Foreign Legion and Arabs is no surprise. The range has widened considerably since.
The hobby shops websites and the sales website mentioned above provided many examples of what was available, but I gradually ran across sites for displaying and discussing toy soldiers, not selling them. Websites dedicated to different brands of soldiers. Several for soldiers about one inch high, about the scale of HO train sets. One site, plastic soldier review, provides reviews, as well-written and pithy as New Yorker magazine movie reviews, of toy soldier sets. There are over 60 different sets of German soldiers from the second world war, all extensively evaluated with photos and commentary. It was on this site I learned the periods for which plastic one inch soldiers are available today:
Ancient World
Republican Rome
Imperial Rome
Late Antiquity
Dark Ages
Medieval Europe
Medieval Asia
Ottoman Empire
Renaissance
Thirty Years War
English Civil War
Early America
Ukrainian Cossack Revolt
Great Northern War
Pirates
War of the Spanish Succession
Jacobite Rebellions
Seven Years War
American War of Independence
French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars
Napoleonic Wars
War of 1812
Carlist Wars
Texan War of Independence
US-Mexican War
Crimean War
Italian Wars of Independence
American Civil War
American Western Frontier
Franco-Prussian War
Zulu Wars
Mahdist Revolt
North-West Frontier (India)
Spanish-American War
Sudan 1898
Second Anglo-Boer War
Boxer Rebellion
French North Africa
Russo-Japanese War
World War I
American Expedition in Mexico 1916
20th Century Revolutions
Russian Civil War
Rif War (1920)
Spanish Civil War
World War II
Korean War
Cold War
Vietnam War
Modern
Not every period or nationality is as heavily represented as Germans of World War II—they are the most popular variety—but there are hundreds of different sets available. It’s as if the cultural variety encouraged in the academy worried with PC and multicultural studies has spread to the world of toy soldiers.
Some sites present pictures of a person’s collection with photographs of rooms full of boxes of soldiers. Some people paint them and put up pictures of dioramas on the web, or post to youtube their videos of battles with toy soldiers. There are forum websites for people to put up pictures and for other enthusiasts to comment on their creations. Articles are written on the histories of different companies, describing the evolution of their packaging, as well as hints for painting and the care of toy soldiers. All these are in addition to and separate from the websites of vendors.
After researching the prices, I put some of my old toys on ebay for auction. Some things did quite well, others didn’t. I found boxes with old model kits I assembled as a child and sold the assembly instructions—not the models themselves, but the instructions—for several dollars each. Some items I priced too high and had to relist, while others had fierce bidding wars.
While searching ebay to figure out how to list the items, I noticed that some items sold for more than the same items, the only difference being the title keywords. If items had the critical words that collectors used to search, they would sell for much more. I made sure the soldiers I sold had all the keywords in their descriptions. On a lark, I tried buying some of the items with general listings and reselling them with the magic words with a mark up in price. I was day-trading toy soldiers.
More Later.
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