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Views from the Toy Box: The Future of Our Plastic Treasures

Posted by Matthew_Frey | April 28, 2012 at 08:27 PM ET

Just how long do you think your Star Wars toys will retain their value? Is it really worth it to continue spending top dollar to get that mint in box 1977 Death Star Playset? Join me here for what I hope will be an insightful personal view of a future that may come for your favorite plastic treasures.

In the mid 90’s something amazing happened. Our generation grew up, got jobs, and started thinking about all those toys we used to have. Now as adults with budgets, expendable income, and a yearning for toys long gone, we took to a newly formed eBay to start tracking down our cherished memories in plastic form. It was easy at first. The idea of nostalgic collecting hadn’t spread to the massive fire it is today. In fact, I remember an owner of a comic store in my home town had access to an entire carded set of every vintage Star Wars figure that he said he would sell me for $1200.00. I foolishly passed, not having the foresight to see that there was something to these toys that was slowly but surely brewing on the horizon. Today, that passed up collection would have brought me thousands of dollars on the secondary market. Not to mention the hours of joy and years of fond memories returned. But, cherished memories aside, where will that monetary value be in say the next twenty years?

If you look at today’s collectors, there are a good amount of people who choose to buy mint in package items for the sole purpose of packing them away in their attic, in hopes that within the next decade or two they will be putting their children through college and retiring to a quiet life solely from the secondary market profit of their hidden treasures. But, who’s going to be buying it?

Take a moment to look at yourself. The majority of you are in your mid thirties, maybe late twenties. A few of you are even older. In twenty years, I would wager that the majority of you will have shifted a vast amount of what you consider to be a priority today - Things such as collecting toys – to other things. Eventually we all want to retire, which means that the majority of us are not going to be spending hundreds of dollars a month on toys, but rather socking money away into 401k’s, savings accounts, and other interest baring facets in hopes of never working another day in our lives.

So, what happens to the toy market at this point? I speculate it crashes - At least for toys of our generation. Much as the toys of my father’s generation, I don’t see the majority of people in their fifties and sixties paying a grand for any one toy. Not unless they’ve got more money than they know what to do with, and let’s be honest here, that’s a pretty exclusive crowd, and to the majority of us, it’s just not sensible thinking, or even conceivable to think that we will have that kind of expendable funding at our disposal at any point in our lives.

Now I’m not saying that there are no exceptions to that rule as far as the continued values of collectible goes. You’ll always have your select few items out there that are so incredibly rare that the price will always continue to rise. Golden Age comics such as Amazing Fantasy number 15 come to mind when I say this. This is because there are simply so few in existence these days due to a good portion of them being thrown away, burned for heat, or simply lost, and even destroyed due to kids reading them nonstop.

However, mass produced toys (to and include the original Star Wars lines from the 70’s and 80’s) which people are literally holding on to intentionally for the sake of secondary market value these days have no chance of seeing that status quo. How can they? There are simply more than enough to go around, and will be for a long time to come. Sure it could be argued that for every one toy that is opened there is one less to be had mint in package, but the point is that open or closed, these toys will be around for years to come, and readily available to all who want them.

I’ve come back to this last paragraph several times since I wrote it thinking over and over how best to end this article, and I think it’s best said like this;

Collecting toys is fun. Or at least, it should be. For those of you collecting toys these days, I cannot recommend enough that you do so for the sole purpose of playing with them, and enjoying them. If you’re looking to some imaginary future of dollar signs beyond your wildest dreams, it may be time to get off that train. Because I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Enjoy your toys for what they are, and if you’re one of those few people out there spending high dollars for toys that you think will yield a larger return, consider what I’ve said.

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