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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3920 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

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I'm looking for theories or just-so story on humans' desire to collect knick-knacks.

A house down the street was having an estate sale. I could tell it belonged to an elderly middle-class couple. The house was a monument to mediocrity. Granted, I got there on the second day, so the family and public had already taken the good stuff, but there wasn't exactly empty space anywhere. It wasn't hoarded, but there were thousands of figurines and collectibles. Some over-studious daughter or granddaughter had put a price tag on every single item. I was actually surprised that I wasn't tempted by a single thing.

Not an uncommon refrain, but this couple had spent a lifetime amassing stuff that no one really wanted. So my question is: why? Is there some misaligned wealth signaling going on? I have my own temptations. I like to buy tools, I want a library someday so I'll probably start amassing books, and I'll probably keep buying guns and end up with more of those three than I need, but I can think of use cases. Am I just rationalizing while I sneer at baseball cards, stamps, Funko Pops, and porcelain figurines?

What are the modern-day Precious Moments collections? Funko Pops?

In addition to the things other people have said, collecting also comes with the thrill of the hunt: if something is rare or poorly-distributed, it becomes a challenge to acquire them, which in terms of personal satisfaction can make collecting cheap tat somewhat fulfilling. You end up developing a knowledge of store distribution and release waves, which appeals to the spreadsheet-sexual among us and is actually kind of exciting if you're into whatever you're collecting. I'm guessing that collectibles brands that do rarity and distribution tricks do much better because they generate that excitement and FOMO.

With older items, it's a lot harder to have that same thrill because eBay has destroyed price arbitrage between insiders and outsiders. Anything valuable gets sold online; there are rarely deals for actually-rare collectibles.

But also, people just like stuff so when it's possible to buy more of it they often will. Believe it or not, grandmas actually treasured their Precious Moments figurines and I aspire to that level of simplicity of heart.

Thinking about elderly people's collections in particular, though: I think it's hard for younger people to understand the environment they lived in for much of their life. In their youthful days, the United States was more agrarian and less urbanized, and they certainly didn't have the immediate access either to facsimiles of the world's greatest works of art or to an algorithmized collection of curated aesthetic delights that we do today. They also lived before the advent of the interstate highway or the wide availability of air travel. For someone in such a less-connected world, the wide availability of mass-market kitsch served as an accessible way to add aesthetic appeal to their world. I get why people hate kitsch. But it's easy to sneer at things like Precious Moments figurines when I can type four words into Google and look at an image of the Trevi fountain. It's much harder when you live in 1940s Kansas.

I guess that's a reason I have trouble relating. My grandma is in her mid 90's, grew up more remote than Kansas with a father killed while she was a teen. She keeps an immaculate uncluttered house with no collectables to speak of.

I think your grandma is the exception. Most of the folks I know around that age are precisely like the people whose estate sale you attended.

My grandma-in-law's house is filled with shit whose retail value is less than the diminished utility they provide her through additional surface areas for dust. The upper floor of her beautiful house isn't inhabitable because nobody has vacuumed in years. But nobody in the family has the backbone to throw it all out.

With older items, it's a lot harder to have that same thrill because eBay has destroyed price arbitrage between insiders and outsiders. Anything valuable gets sold online; there are rarely deals for actually-rare collectibles.

That's why I think it's better to collect stuff where the hard to find stuff is just harder to find and not necessarily more valuable. Consider record collecting. If you're looking for that super-rare Beatles UK first pressing then yeah, you're going to pay an arm and a leg for it, because The Beatles are one of the most popular bands in history and there are a lot of fans vying for the collectibles. On the other hand, if you're trying to collect the complete discography of an independent record company, most of the stuff you're going to have trouble tracking down is the stuff that didn't sell well and accordingly doesn't have a lot of demand; it's the kind of stuff that record stores price at a buck when it comes in (usually as part of a large auction lot) so it isn't sitting on the shelves for a decade. I love Bruce Cockburn and I buy original Canadian pressings of his records when I can find them (though the American ones are of higher quality) but I think the most I've paid for an album is like $7.00. This is the kind of guy who's incredible but little known; a bought a few of his records at a well-known used record store in Pittsburgh and the owner got excited and told me he intentionally marked the records down in the hope that someone would become a fan based on price alone.

On the other hand, while E-Bay has complicated the market a bit, it really hasn't changed that much. While E-Bay has made it more likely for someone who doesn't know what they have to get top dollar for a collectible because they happened to list it at the right time, you can still find deals the old-fashioned way if you have the patience. Most of the old garage sale finds are still garage sale finds unless you're talking about baseball cards or Star Wars toys or Christmas Tree ornaments or any of the other items that seem to only exist as collectibles. If someone has a painting they're under the impression their mother bought at a starving artist's expo in 1966 they aren't going to go to the hassle of listing it individually on E-Bay on the off chance that it's worth something. If you're eagle-eyed and happen to discover that it's actually a Whistler, then you've made the score. In the pre-Ebay days, most of the stuff that anyone thought of having any value was either sold through dealers or through listings in specialized collector's magazines. I'd estimate that the number of people selling genuinely valuable stuff at flea markets, garage sales, and the like isn't that much lower than it was in the '90s.

It’s intrinsically enjoyable to collect things just as a human instinct, hence why so many video games have a collection feature. For those old people, it’s likely two things combined: an enjoyment of the pattern of seeking for an item (this is enjoyable even just for seashells on the beach), and then having memories attached to the items that they don’t want to lose

With older people in particular, the hoarders I think often reflect broad scale deflation in manufactured goods over time. Older people grew up with more expensive manufactured goods. Little nonsense like commemorative plates and snow babies and precious moments probably all fall into the category of things that would have been more expensive when they were young. My dad is a frequent overbuyer, of many things, and when he does it always takes the justification of "that would have been [3x price] back in the day." Especially with tools and things like that, he'll buy entirely too many power drills or tool boxes because they used to be more expensive. Nobody could really sell the little cheap commemorative crap for as cheap as it is today back in the day, so they buy it feeling like it must have real value, even though it doesn't at this point.

Also, the useless stuff is the most likely to survive. The Precious Moments don't wear out, don't get moved around and break often, etc. I've purchased a decent number of laptops and cellphones, and more measuring tapes than I can count. When I die, there won't be many of them left in the house, they'll be destroyed or lost, worn out or stolen.

Haven't thought about this at all, but here's some off-the-top theorizing:

In having a collection of nearly anything, you demonstrate a commitment to something in the past, present, and future and the ability to commit to and maintain the collection itself over time. I think it could be a sort of signalling mechanism for the ability to collection and manage resources without being as crass as "I gotta lotta money!" This would also explain why wealthier people tend to collect more expensive things (watches, cars, etc.). So it's a kind of wealth display sewn together with plausible deniability ("I just really like xyz thing!") ... so this would also explain, perhaps, why women collect more (do they? idk) and why they collect less ostentatious things - knick knacks, figurines.

I don't think you need to dig any deeper than "people like stuff, so they amass it".

Older generations considered collecting utterly useless but aligned in a theme figurines to be a feminine and normal use of disposable income, and it was also seen as making it easy for husbands to shop for birthday gifts. This is where the stereotype of grandma with the looking-at dolls comes from.

My mother really likes Mickey Mouse. It is well-known to her friends and family that she really likes Mickey Mouse.

She now has a lot of Mickey Mouse merchandise.

It goes for men sometimes too, my friend really likes dragons (enough to write dragon-themed fanfiction and explain various forms of dragon lore) and he now has a small but growing collection of dragon memorabilia.

I had forgotten about the gift aspect. Your husband and the rest of your family has a go to gift to get you so that can cause an accumulation over a few decades.

And women setting up gift exchanges, etc. If you collect unicorn figurines specifically so you’re easy to shop for, you’ll accumulate lots of unicorn figurines over the course of 50 years.

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