Day 170
We had a little excitement here last week. I’d call it a win. Although, I suppose it is only tangentially related to The Simple Year; I’m going to tell you about it anyway.
It started, as many things do at our house these days, at a garage sale. I found a Girl Scout necklace for one of my kids. Any parent out there knows that you can’t buy something for one child and turn up empty handed for the other. I was in a hurry, so I scanned the sale for something suitable and inexpensive and finally grabbed a little Disney Dalmatian Dog ceramic thing, paid and headed to my car.
Once there, I happened to spot the price tag- $3. I couldn’t believe I spent three bucks on such a silly item. I mean in garage sale money that is like spending $150 retail on a pair of shoes you are only going to wear once. Usually my limit for garage sale impulse items to placate my kids is fifty cents.
Whatever
A week or two passed and I remembered the little gifts. Before handing them out, I turned the ceramic dogs over to scratch off the price tag. Huh, they were numbered with many words on the bottom to include Limoges. I had heard of that before so I consulted my friend Google.
What appeared to be the same item was listed on some collectible site for $599 and other Disney boxes of the same brand were listed for over $300 on Ebay.
Wait…What? No one would pay that kind of money for a 2” x 2” dust catcher…right?
Surely this is too good to be true, but my kids and I decided to list the box on E-Bay anyway. I told them I would take them to do something fun with any money we made over the original investment (notice I am now calling my $3, an investment, instead of stupid impulse buy).
We found there is, in fact, someone in Texas that will apparently pay $371.99 for that fabulous little collectible which is like $15 per spot.
During the auction, the kids thought it was pretty fun to repeatedly check the status of the item. The down side of that was that in freaky Orwellian fashion my computer thought I liked glass collectibles. And every time I turned it on, the ads on the sides would be for places like The Bradford Exchange and the Danbury Mint. These are places that you can MAKE THREE EASY PAYMENTS OF $30 for a genuine Dale Earnhardt Jr. Personalized Outdoor Sculpture Of His Dog (see that would be funny if it weren’t true, but it is—so it’s sad) As far as I could tell those sites exclusively sell items with no real use. Although I suppose you COULD serve your holiday meals on your set of Thomas Kinkade collectible Christmas plates, but I’m not sure that is their intended purpose.
Anyway, a few days have passed and my computer is back to status quo with the ads offering me all kinds of options to lose weight and reverse the aging process. We netted over $350 and the kids are busy plotting planning their next adventure and are convinced we can find more of those little boxes to resell.