Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
Discussion - Member to Member Sales - Research Center
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Phil, some of my best German stamps came from a garage sale. My wife and daughter went to a neighborhood garage sale and came back with a shoebox full of stamps, I took a look and told my wife
to go back and buy all of the stamps they had, but that was it. That night when out of curiosity check
the stamps to see what I've got, didn't take me long to realized that I hit the jackpot, not even an hour
into sorting I was already over $1000 CV and mostly of German stamps. It did included a lot of UN stamps that I didn't care for but needless to say that I was a happy camper.
Do not underestimate garage sales, you never know what you'll find.
BTW they pay only $15.00.
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Stampcollector, i agree...a lucky find where perhaps someone wants to unload a relatives stamps is always good. One ad i responded to ..i purchased a couple of hundred dollars worth of glassines and mounts for about 30 bucks...the womans parents had been stamp dealers,its a shame the stamps were already gone,,but i was buying boxes of #4 glassines for 3 dollars each.
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We had our first ever yard sale 2 weeks ago. Vintage furniture, automobilia items, lava lamps, rock and roll LPs, rubber tire ash trays, architectural salvage, a couple of 110 gallon fish tanks…all sold like hot cakes. I put out a single stamp album, 4,000 stamps, a set of older catalogs, all bundled at $10 just to see if there were any takers; there was not. The hobby has moved online.
Don
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Could it just be that stamp collectors do not go to yard/garage sales? I know that I don't but if any come up at local, general auctions there are usually a number of bidders.
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I for one have gone to yard sales ever since I was still a youngster;
being from a fairly poor background, much of what I wore to school in those
days came from garage/yard/porch sales.
I would often find wonderful 'treasures' at those sales that I could actually
afford with my lawn-mowing money!
And many was the time I found stamps and related items to add to my collection...
...baseball cards, too!
Thus, these sales - and the accompanying flea markets as well - remain one of my
favorite things to peruse to this very day! 
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I am not a hardcore yard sale attendee but I have never seen stamps. You do see coins, etc.
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A couple of years ago our oldest son and his family were doing the "sell at a Flea Market" routine - the B & A Flea Market, in Stuart, FL. Since it was just before Christmas, I had the great idea of packaging up and selling 50-100 different USA stamps in Zip-Lock bags at 50 cents ea. I promoted these as Christmas "stocking stuffers". A really great idea - but none sold!
I also took along about 100 used worldwide Post Cards at 50 cents ea. One was from Italy and showed a topless young lady surf fishing. Can you guess which was the only Post Card that sold? Hmmm.
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Southern Italy always amazed me..(1961) the young maidens walked around in black smocks..extremely innocent...until they got to the beach !
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These days, if you can't buy it on Amazon, it doesn't exist.
-Paul
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Stamps are often found and sold at the flea market I sell at. More coins appear, however, than stamps.
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My late brother and nephew went to any rummage sale they could find. Quite often, they brought me stamps. Most of the time they were the usual common stamps. One day I hit the jackpot. They brought me 4 banker's boxes and 6 totes of stamps. There was a lot of Oceania. I have probably sold a few hundred dollars worth and I also found an Italian airmail stamp with a SCV of $300. They paid $25 for the whole works.
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12:00:15pm
I was, just last night, going through a junky old stamp album I picked up at a yard sale many years ago. Nothing was labeled, the countries were spelled wrong, some stumps stuck in with glue (ugh!), mixed up, etc. I expected to find nothing, just looking for fun. But I found about 30 cheap older German stamps I din't have. Now all I have to do is try to get them out of the album!
I know this is changing the direction of the thread, but here is part of a short history of stamp hinges.
http://digital.ipcprintservices.com/publication/?i=133838&article_id=1231198&view=articleBrowser#{"issue_id":133838,"view":"articleBrowser","article_id":"1231198"}
Notice what was done in the PH (pre-hinge) era!
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When I first restarted collecting I used to be able to buy stamps and postcards in charity shops. Now most of such shops sell on collectables via dealers, and even when they don't do so their prices are higher than e-bay ( sometimes much higher ). While I don't mind paying a bit more to support a charity some of them are getting a wee bit unrealistic.
In the UK we tend not to have yard sales, but we do have a phenomenon known as a "car boot sale". Originally the local sports club or school would rent out spaces, and people would turn up and sell things out of the boot ( trunk ) of their car. In our UK winters a "table top sale" was an alternative. Real bargains could be had, the seller got rid of their junk at a profit and the charity/school made a bit of cash. When my kids were younger I was on the parent/teacher organisation and our annual table-top sale used to buy additional sports equipment not included in the annual budget. We always used to advertise what we had bought with the money to encourage repeat business.
These days things are very different - the majority of sellers are professional dealers, and they make sure that they buy the choice bits from the few private sellers in the first half-hour, and most stuff which is on sale after that is then overpriced or unsaleable. We stopped our PTA sales when the antics of some of the dealers became too intolerably aggressive and the "parents" felt overpressurised. Many of the car boot sales are now weekly events with 100s of "stalls" organised by a professional company and are more like markets.
I no longer visit these car boot sales as a matter of course but I have been known to visit the remaining few charity ones held locally wherever I am on holiday. Stamps very seldom feature but postcards with stamps are sometimes available, and my best buy was a cardboard box full of old stamp magazines for £2, which gave me hours of reading pleasure.
Malcolm
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My experience at flea markets and yard sales is that the majority are really doing this as a business (legal or otherwise). You see the same people with setups on a regular basis (yard sales, flea markets, etc).
My wife had a table at a flea market to dispose of some of her parent's estate and the buyers were mostly those at the flea market that sell stuff!
Stamps seem too fragile for many of these type places but there is weekly flea market at the state fair grounds and many sellers are inside. These can handle more fragile material. The lighting cannot be good for stamps as many items do not sell for a very long time and not always climate controlled.
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I've had some luck at two flea markets.
At one flea market, a woman had 15 or 20 used Russia air letters that I bought for five dollars. All included cachets of Russian airliners, and there was little duplication. Here are images of four of the covers. The first one pictures a Tupolev Tu-114, a variant of the famous Tupolev Tu-95, with the NATO reporting name "Bear". The Bear was Russia's first nuclear-capable bomber. It's still in use, much like the American B-52 nuclear bomber.
The Tu-95/114 are interesting planes: four turboprop engines swing eight contra-rotating propellers. Contra-rotating propellers deliver more power, and cancel torque, but are much noisier than conventional propellers systems, and are more expensive to install and maintain.
I don't know when these covers were posted. I am not familiar with the Russian dating system. I bought them soon after we moved to Vancouver, in 2001. I assume that they were mailed between the 1960s into the 1980s):
At another flea market, just as I was leaving, I spotted a tiny cover in a basket, and bought it on a whim. The price was right — 25 cents. Only when I got home and took a close look at the cover that I realized I'd spent a whole quarter on a mini philatelic treasure: the cover contained a birth announcement, and was postmarked not just on D-Day, but at nearly the precise time(I think) that the the American general in command of the attack on Omaha Beach waded ashore to set up his command post. Here's a image of the album page I created, as well as an image of the inside of the birth announcement:
Figuring out what the time was on Omaha Beach when the cover was postmarked is...challenging. England was on double daylight time, so I assume that the Allied military forces relied on time in the UK. At least that's the premise I worked on, but I can get confused about leaping back and springing going back and forth between daylight time and ordinary time. At the very least, I know that the cover was posted on D-Day!
Bob
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02:19:32am
Without getting too technical converting the times of USA 10AM CDST to whatever time the Brits were on during War saving time the war I'd guess that 10AM in Alabama would be about a five , maybe four, from London. So 10 Am here then would be around 2PM or 3Pm there, so since generals seldom land in the first wave as dawn brakes, it is likely you are right it could be that some corps commander with his staff had just landed at either Omaha or Utah beaches. Either way, it makes for a good story
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I rarely bring stamps/coins to the flea market. However, there is a guy across from me who does almost every weekend. He sold a binder of the "gold" stamps for $20. I told he did real good getting that kind of money for it. Last month I sold a half binder of those for $10, so I guess I did pretty good too! Difficult (next to impossible) to sell them to collectors, but take them to a different environment, and people (non-collectors) like them.
Regarding the comment about sellers buying the items to resell, I call them "vultures". I learned early on to not let them get an upper hand as they will try to talk you down to nothing, when you could sell the items for much more to non-sellers. I just tell them that UI am not their wholesaler. If they want to buy my entire booth, that's fine, and I'll give them a great price for everything, but i won't let them cherry pick me at much deflated prices.
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When I was still in New Jersey, our town enacted an ordinance limiting garage sales to four a year per house, which is quite liberal. They did this to end those perpetual garage sales at certain houses every single weekend!
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Texas law allows two garage sales per year without requiring a sales tax collection permit. Sales at flea markets, hobby shows, craft shows, etc. require a sales tax permit and the collection of sales tax.
Does the State Comptroller ever show up at these sales events? Yes. You'd better have your permit with you, and have it displayed. Those without one, have to stop selling until the paperwork is completed on site and a temporary sales tax permit issued.
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There is a "Country Living" Expo at the Rhinebeck fairgrounds this weekend and women from all over the North Eastern States flock in..so many people in the area take advantage with their own yard sales and such. My daughter rented a space at the local Masonic lodge so i decided to attend and show off my stamps,covers and brought some fliers from our club hoping to promote it. My wife had me bring a wicker setee and chair that was taking up space in our porch. The chair went to a woman from Pennsylvania and the setee went to a woman from New Jersey..so at least my wife and two other woman were happy. I know the Country living is mainly a female oriented event..but eveyone attends the flea markets. I am afraid we stamp collectors are a secret society...no one seemed interested in my cards,covers and stamps. Thank goodness for the internet and our stamp club..otherwise as far as stamps its a wasteland out there.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Phil, some of my best German stamps came from a garage sale. My wife and daughter went to a neighborhood garage sale and came back with a shoebox full of stamps, I took a look and told my wife
to go back and buy all of the stamps they had, but that was it. That night when out of curiosity check
the stamps to see what I've got, didn't take me long to realized that I hit the jackpot, not even an hour
into sorting I was already over $1000 CV and mostly of German stamps. It did included a lot of UN stamps that I didn't care for but needless to say that I was a happy camper.
Do not underestimate garage sales, you never know what you'll find.
BTW they pay only $15.00.
Login to Like
this post
Auctions
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Stampcollector, i agree...a lucky find where perhaps someone wants to unload a relatives stamps is always good. One ad i responded to ..i purchased a couple of hundred dollars worth of glassines and mounts for about 30 bucks...the womans parents had been stamp dealers,its a shame the stamps were already gone,,but i was buying boxes of #4 glassines for 3 dollars each.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
We had our first ever yard sale 2 weeks ago. Vintage furniture, automobilia items, lava lamps, rock and roll LPs, rubber tire ash trays, architectural salvage, a couple of 110 gallon fish tanks…all sold like hot cakes. I put out a single stamp album, 4,000 stamps, a set of older catalogs, all bundled at $10 just to see if there were any takers; there was not. The hobby has moved online.
Don
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Could it just be that stamp collectors do not go to yard/garage sales? I know that I don't but if any come up at local, general auctions there are usually a number of bidders.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
I for one have gone to yard sales ever since I was still a youngster;
being from a fairly poor background, much of what I wore to school in those
days came from garage/yard/porch sales.
I would often find wonderful 'treasures' at those sales that I could actually
afford with my lawn-mowing money!
And many was the time I found stamps and related items to add to my collection...
...baseball cards, too!
Thus, these sales - and the accompanying flea markets as well - remain one of my
favorite things to peruse to this very day!
2 Members
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
I am not a hardcore yard sale attendee but I have never seen stamps. You do see coins, etc.
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this post
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
A couple of years ago our oldest son and his family were doing the "sell at a Flea Market" routine - the B & A Flea Market, in Stuart, FL. Since it was just before Christmas, I had the great idea of packaging up and selling 50-100 different USA stamps in Zip-Lock bags at 50 cents ea. I promoted these as Christmas "stocking stuffers". A really great idea - but none sold!
I also took along about 100 used worldwide Post Cards at 50 cents ea. One was from Italy and showed a topless young lady surf fishing. Can you guess which was the only Post Card that sold? Hmmm.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Southern Italy always amazed me..(1961) the young maidens walked around in black smocks..extremely innocent...until they got to the beach !
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01:54:12pm
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
These days, if you can't buy it on Amazon, it doesn't exist.
-Paul
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07:46:06pm
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Stamps are often found and sold at the flea market I sell at. More coins appear, however, than stamps.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
My late brother and nephew went to any rummage sale they could find. Quite often, they brought me stamps. Most of the time they were the usual common stamps. One day I hit the jackpot. They brought me 4 banker's boxes and 6 totes of stamps. There was a lot of Oceania. I have probably sold a few hundred dollars worth and I also found an Italian airmail stamp with a SCV of $300. They paid $25 for the whole works.
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05 Jun 2019
12:00:15pm
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
I was, just last night, going through a junky old stamp album I picked up at a yard sale many years ago. Nothing was labeled, the countries were spelled wrong, some stumps stuck in with glue (ugh!), mixed up, etc. I expected to find nothing, just looking for fun. But I found about 30 cheap older German stamps I din't have. Now all I have to do is try to get them out of the album!
I know this is changing the direction of the thread, but here is part of a short history of stamp hinges.
http://digital.ipcprintservices.com/publication/?i=133838&article_id=1231198&view=articleBrowser#{"issue_id":133838,"view":"articleBrowser","article_id":"1231198"}
Notice what was done in the PH (pre-hinge) era!
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06:47:39am
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
When I first restarted collecting I used to be able to buy stamps and postcards in charity shops. Now most of such shops sell on collectables via dealers, and even when they don't do so their prices are higher than e-bay ( sometimes much higher ). While I don't mind paying a bit more to support a charity some of them are getting a wee bit unrealistic.
In the UK we tend not to have yard sales, but we do have a phenomenon known as a "car boot sale". Originally the local sports club or school would rent out spaces, and people would turn up and sell things out of the boot ( trunk ) of their car. In our UK winters a "table top sale" was an alternative. Real bargains could be had, the seller got rid of their junk at a profit and the charity/school made a bit of cash. When my kids were younger I was on the parent/teacher organisation and our annual table-top sale used to buy additional sports equipment not included in the annual budget. We always used to advertise what we had bought with the money to encourage repeat business.
These days things are very different - the majority of sellers are professional dealers, and they make sure that they buy the choice bits from the few private sellers in the first half-hour, and most stuff which is on sale after that is then overpriced or unsaleable. We stopped our PTA sales when the antics of some of the dealers became too intolerably aggressive and the "parents" felt overpressurised. Many of the car boot sales are now weekly events with 100s of "stalls" organised by a professional company and are more like markets.
I no longer visit these car boot sales as a matter of course but I have been known to visit the remaining few charity ones held locally wherever I am on holiday. Stamps very seldom feature but postcards with stamps are sometimes available, and my best buy was a cardboard box full of old stamp magazines for £2, which gave me hours of reading pleasure.
Malcolm
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
My experience at flea markets and yard sales is that the majority are really doing this as a business (legal or otherwise). You see the same people with setups on a regular basis (yard sales, flea markets, etc).
My wife had a table at a flea market to dispose of some of her parent's estate and the buyers were mostly those at the flea market that sell stuff!
Stamps seem too fragile for many of these type places but there is weekly flea market at the state fair grounds and many sellers are inside. These can handle more fragile material. The lighting cannot be good for stamps as many items do not sell for a very long time and not always climate controlled.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
I've had some luck at two flea markets.
At one flea market, a woman had 15 or 20 used Russia air letters that I bought for five dollars. All included cachets of Russian airliners, and there was little duplication. Here are images of four of the covers. The first one pictures a Tupolev Tu-114, a variant of the famous Tupolev Tu-95, with the NATO reporting name "Bear". The Bear was Russia's first nuclear-capable bomber. It's still in use, much like the American B-52 nuclear bomber.
The Tu-95/114 are interesting planes: four turboprop engines swing eight contra-rotating propellers. Contra-rotating propellers deliver more power, and cancel torque, but are much noisier than conventional propellers systems, and are more expensive to install and maintain.
I don't know when these covers were posted. I am not familiar with the Russian dating system. I bought them soon after we moved to Vancouver, in 2001. I assume that they were mailed between the 1960s into the 1980s):
At another flea market, just as I was leaving, I spotted a tiny cover in a basket, and bought it on a whim. The price was right — 25 cents. Only when I got home and took a close look at the cover that I realized I'd spent a whole quarter on a mini philatelic treasure: the cover contained a birth announcement, and was postmarked not just on D-Day, but at nearly the precise time(I think) that the the American general in command of the attack on Omaha Beach waded ashore to set up his command post. Here's a image of the album page I created, as well as an image of the inside of the birth announcement:
Figuring out what the time was on Omaha Beach when the cover was postmarked is...challenging. England was on double daylight time, so I assume that the Allied military forces relied on time in the UK. At least that's the premise I worked on, but I can get confused about leaping back and springing going back and forth between daylight time and ordinary time. At the very least, I know that the cover was posted on D-Day!
Bob
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17 Jun 2019
02:19:32am
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Without getting too technical converting the times of USA 10AM CDST to whatever time the Brits were on during War saving time the war I'd guess that 10AM in Alabama would be about a five , maybe four, from London. So 10 Am here then would be around 2PM or 3Pm there, so since generals seldom land in the first wave as dawn brakes, it is likely you are right it could be that some corps commander with his staff had just landed at either Omaha or Utah beaches. Either way, it makes for a good story
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09:25:09pm
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
I rarely bring stamps/coins to the flea market. However, there is a guy across from me who does almost every weekend. He sold a binder of the "gold" stamps for $20. I told he did real good getting that kind of money for it. Last month I sold a half binder of those for $10, so I guess I did pretty good too! Difficult (next to impossible) to sell them to collectors, but take them to a different environment, and people (non-collectors) like them.
Regarding the comment about sellers buying the items to resell, I call them "vultures". I learned early on to not let them get an upper hand as they will try to talk you down to nothing, when you could sell the items for much more to non-sellers. I just tell them that UI am not their wholesaler. If they want to buy my entire booth, that's fine, and I'll give them a great price for everything, but i won't let them cherry pick me at much deflated prices.
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re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
When I was still in New Jersey, our town enacted an ordinance limiting garage sales to four a year per house, which is quite liberal. They did this to end those perpetual garage sales at certain houses every single weekend!
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11:32:57pm
re: My attempt at selling stamps and covers at a flea market
Texas law allows two garage sales per year without requiring a sales tax collection permit. Sales at flea markets, hobby shows, craft shows, etc. require a sales tax permit and the collection of sales tax.
Does the State Comptroller ever show up at these sales events? Yes. You'd better have your permit with you, and have it displayed. Those without one, have to stop selling until the paperwork is completed on site and a temporary sales tax permit issued.
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