The Less Blob

I will give midtown credit. At their downtown location at least If some book has become a $10-15 item day of release they do not pull them off the rack and reprice. They will often limit 1 to a customer, which is fair. Roger doesn't jack the price up either, but he does not order 300 rack copies of a book.

I had spotlight 12 and SOS 1 in my store forever and the other day they just sold for my ask.

If a lable was generated via ebay / PayPal ought you have the tracking number too?

So what happened with this? It seems he sold the same lot twice, one of which went for $26, and cancelled one of them? Someone left him negative feedback.

Right, and it looks like 344 is now selling for more than $1 again. Anyway, we're still talking about 6 or 7 issues over the course of 10-15+ years.

Thor is a dead title outside of 337-339 for like a 300 issue stretch, so it would be nice to have another book of interest.

A bunch of those have really exploded. FF 48 used to be a deal sweetener on many purchases back in the 90s. It was $ in guide, but did not sell so well, so on multiple occasions I had them tosses into deals for a stack of books to get me to bite. I blew out my copies for $50-200 a pop when FF 2 was announced (none were better than a 6.0) and I figured they'd never do any better. Luckily for my psyche none of those keys were really high grade.

Why bother with a return? How much is return shipping going to cost on bags like this?

More like an 8.0. She frowns too much.

I don't consider a partial refund request to be a scam per se... I miss stuff, most of us miss stuff once in a while. If they show me something I missed and I agree that knocks the book from a VF to Fine, but they want to keep the book, then a partial makes sense. If I missed something huge like a missing page, clipped insides or whatever I just let them have the book for free. I sold a copy (non-CGC, a bit lower grade copy) of this book (which is on the Gerber "rare" or scarce list or something like that, 6 copies on the CGC census) to someone here and missed that some 3 year old had decided to do cut outs on some of the pages. Anyway, the boardie got the book free, at that point I felt terrible:

I am grateful for that. Although hitting us with furloughs in the form of our checks getting docked 10% while still working full time was a stress during those times, but I know it could have been worse.

Government job gave me job security (I'm not in a union, but we had so much work they couldn't fire people), but the pay was 40% of what I had been making in private practice

I'll put a smiley face on it

Depends where. I see houses listed in some cities for less than they sold for 15 years ago. I happen to have done well where I live. I wish I had been able to buy when prices were down 2009-2011 and have a second property to rent or sell right now, but I had no cash.

I got out of most of my keys too early because I bought and renovated a house. While I have done very well on the house (until that bubble bursts at least) I wish I had kept most of the good comics I sold and figured out a way to generate that $ elsewhere. 2006-2007 was not a terrible time to sell, but there was a lot more growth to be had on some of these books.

I hate to agree with TwoPiece on anything, but a 7.0 seems reasonable on that one, although, do these books come with gloss? I feel like I have 50s Charltons that do.

This discussion confuses me. I bought silver age marvel keys in the 90s because I love the genre and I thought they had good financial upside to them. I figured they had 5-10% yearly appreciation in them, so were not a terrible investment vehicle. Hindsight being 20/20 the money I have spent on comics over the years probably would have done better in the stock market or as down payments in income producing properties, but who knows?

"I think I'm a collector first. Somewhat reluctant to open a comic book and read it," OK, while I too am hesitant to open up a comic that looks 9.6-9.8ish (unless I bought it off the rack to read) that is worth anything, lower grade copies are perfect for such an activity

Yeah, I sold TOS 39, JIM 83/84, multiple FF 48s, GS X-men 1, multiple ASM 129s, 300s, ST 110, etc at the first blips of movie hype. Should have held on.

I see more financial upside at a show, for example, buying $100 worth of carefully selected $1-3 books than trying to get a deal on a $100 book, but more work In realizing that upside. In terms of immediate return. Of course, a mid grade ASM 129 or IM 55 cost $100 not that long ago, so it depends on what you plunk down for. What always gets me is when I lower my standards, although it is usually to get a bulk deal.

If only landlords jacking up rent 40-100% would get on board! That's what frustrates me about my latest local closing. His business was doing fine. 2 full time employees. Always willing to buy stuff and paid decently for good stuff. But not well enough to absorb a $3k a month rent increase.

While it does not sound like it is the OP's issue (or mine), don't some people wind up with a bunch of junk buying collections? I assume a lot of folks selling just say "take it all." Even if you're only really "paying" for 20% of the books?

If you have a good working relationship (or friendship) with a shop owner why leave a present for some collector you don't know? Decent chance the shop owner is in a worse financial situation than the anonymous collector.

I still itemize because I have a chunky mortgage and the childcare deductions proved useful (was able to deduct after school and camp this year). My wife also has a consulting side hustle she deducts against. I did not get around to donating my usual box of comics to the thrift shop though. Have in the past. I claimed $2 each, but as I see they put $3-4 price tags on their comics now, I will be upping that. For those of you with comic empires where you are reporting income, couldn't a donation like this be predictable?

For nearly 15 years I would hit up 25 vent, 2 for $1, 3 for $2, and $1 boxes at local shops during lunch and spend the $10-15 I might have spent on lunch on comics instead. And I already had a decent size 5,000 or so comic collection before that. Most of the purchases were thought out at the time, but as far as the moderns go, they were better for readability than flippability. Some of you have seen my comic disaster zone. I had a real Mary kondo moment this morning when I was trying to squeeze some non comic stuff my wife wanted me to store up there. I was very much WTF have I done??