The Pez Outlaw

“So when the Austrian guards stopped Steve and Joshua at the Hungarian border and threatened to confiscate the toys, the Glews fled east to Budapest, bringing their Black Santas with them. Back in the U.S. the dispensers sold for hundreds of dollars each, and Steve vowed to return to Europe, next time with serious money.”

So they chose not to cross into Austria, but stay in Hungary and go to Budapest (and, somehow, to the US from there) instead.

Once there's a large group of "needful" collectors, the other collections (the kind that want to make money) show up. If an item becomes "hot" with needful collectors, the speculators will buy it up, creating scarcity and driving prices even higher.

This works out pretty good, until a disruption happens in the market. Sometimes the market gets flooded with low-value merch (how many X-titles were there?) Sometimes a couple of movie bombs ruin the property (exhibit number 1: "The Fantastic Four.")

You see this disruption in the "real world" too. When was the last time you saw a "used CD store?"

But for the "needful" collectors, the value is in having the thing. And the more the thing costs, the more value people place in having it.

As a previous Pez collector back in the 7th grade, or "Pezhead" (back in the 90s using my paper route money) who yes, attended several Pez conventions at the time, I can attest that the draw was in-part connecting with other people around a shared interest -- the community.

Although some of the email on the big Pez email list at the time [1] was buying and selling, a lot of it was joking around, organizing meet-ups, sharing stories about a great "find" at a garage sale etc...

For me, the ability to connect via email with people from around the globe talking about a subject like Pez was what stuck with me. Although my Pez collecting ended, that unifying aspect of the internet continued to inspire me through my formative years and continues to this day.

That said, here is an indie documentary about "Pezheads" if you are interested in hearing more about crazy collectors: http://pezheadsthemovie.com/

[1] http://www.pezlist.com/ The Original Pezheads Email List, online since 1995

Having observed people in a fanatical collecting hobby (vintage pens) through the insistence of a friend of mine, I get the impression that people involved in such collecting often strongly dislike eBay and similar sites. eBay, for all its faults, creates some level of transparency and openness in the market, and allows everyone to buy, sell, and appraise. For what are essentially fragile but persistent bubbles, transparency is bad.

Dealers want to be able to tell stories about pieces and their rarity, without a large market to let buyers verify them, and want to be able to hide sales, letting them inflate prices as much as possible. They certainly don't want anyone to be able to compare prices. Buyers want to be able to get special access to sales of pieces (or what they think is special access), or want to find people who don't know the value of what they have.

It's interesting hearing people in the hobby talk about these things. Dealers will rant about eBay and its dangers, or about buyers who "don't want to pay enough" (meaning they didn't sell that piece at all). Buyers will talk about how so-and-so contacted them first about a new piece, or about the amazing rarity of pieces that nevertheless seem to show up pretty often, or about how values appreciate with time. Unsurprisingly, doing painstaking research on auction sales over the last several decades, my friend found that values of most pieces did not even outpace inflation. Somehow, this didn't dissuade him. The hobby/bubble in its current form, though, is dying, and that's a good thing.

This is even more the case for collecting bubbles that are based around items currently being manufactured, as there is always the possibility of just creating more, and that risk is highest when everyone knows what is going on. In this case, for example, the manufacturer was easily able to destroy the dealer's business, but did so because the pieces were being very publicly sold. Had he instead kept everything quiet, and sold privately, he could have kept up what was essentially a scam for much longer.

I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content. Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the music, purchasing a file makes more sense. But I never save articles, I don't have the time to re-read them. Subscription seems perfect.

How much would I pay for such a service? Potentially a lot. If it could get me past any paywall or even just the most common ones I run into, I might pay a hundred bucks a month for it. I can consume a lot of long-form articles, many many more than I can books or movies. Subscribing to a magazine has too little signal-to-noise, I'm not looking for just any article to read. Nor do I have enough time to read a whole magazine.

https://longform.org/publications/vanity-fair

The end of communism was surprisingly peaceful. Yugoslavia rapidly disintegrating afterwards was an entirely different affair. Austria had a border with Yugoslavia - with the part that today is known as Slowenia. The actual independence war of Slovenia lasted only 10 days [1]. Still, troop movements happened in sight of the Austrian border and the Austrians were not happy at all.

The outbreak of full conflict between the recently declared independent states of Croatia and Bosnia with Yugoslavia happend shortly after and was not over in 1993/94 [2]. So I guess any Austrian border patrol would have been wary of refugees/smugglers/shady elements crossing any eastern border.

Hungary was never immediately affected by the war in the former Yugoslavia, but it had an enormously long border with a country at war with itself and the economic impact (loss of trade with the southern neighbours, influx of refugees etc.) could be felt in many ways. So, compared to western standards, Hungary might, at the time, have looked slightly less than appealing. In particular if you didn't know the local language and were smuggling...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

Even speaking of Hungary, which shares a border with Croatia, Slovenia, some with Serbia further south east[corrected], but not Bosnia the situation was tense but not war-torn. The peak of the Croatian part of the Yugoslav wars was over with the 1992 ceasefire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_Wars

Yugoslavia bordered the two countries mentioned - Austria and Hungary.