We Wants It. We Needs It. Must Have The Precious. Part 1.

I see a lot of wannbe pickers on the flea-postcard-vintage-antique-estate sale circuit. I can always tell who the pretenders are. They don’t understand the process, don’t have the patience, and don’t last. Picking is a dirty, grimy, back-breaking job that requires cash, consistency, broad market knowledge in a variety of fields, the ability to do math on the fly, and a touch of madness manifesting as a love of the hunt. It is not easy, I get it. So, at the risk of creating a bunch of competitors, here are some insights into how to pick.

First of all, get your behind out of bed, you lazy lima bean! The early bird catching the worm applies to picking more than just about any other endeavor in the collecting field. I get to every event as early as I can. If the dealers start setting up at 5:00 in the morning, I am there at 5:01. If it means I get to outdoor events in winter when it is freezing cold and still dark out, I bring a flashlight and gloves; I’ll live. I also pop for the VIP admission whenever it gets me a substantial time advantage at an antique show. One good find can cover dozens of early bird admission fees. I recently bought the largest (by volume) deal of my life because I was there at 5:10 a.m. A dealer had an enormous accretion of vintage postcards and trade cards and offered the whole kit and kaboodle to me for a relative song; couldn’t whip out the hundreds fast enough. I got that deal only because I was first through the door. If dragging your ass into a car at 4:00 in the morning on Sunday doesn’t appeal to you, stay home, because if you show up at 7:00, you are wasting your time.

Go prepared to get dirty and worn out. If you do it right, you’re gonna paw through dusty boxes of junk, pop squats on dirty floors and in parking lots to sift through piles of junk, and regularly handle broken glass and rusty metal. I cover miles every time and need to hose down when I get home to get rid of all the garage dust. I wear heavy work gloves and boots, jeans, and a long-sleeve work shirt (even on 100-degree summer days), and also bring nitrile exam gloves, band-aids and antibiotic cream just in case something cuts me or even takes a bite out of me; oh, did I mention the small, fuzzy armored things that are sometimes in the boxes? Yeah, fishing a creepy-crawly out of a box of paper will keep you on your toes.

Relentlessness is my biggest asset on a pick. I go to work, grind it out and sometimes I find stuff that other people passed by because they were unwilling to really dig around and get dirty. I once got a hell of a trove of N cards by being relentless. I dug them out of a dealer’s random inventory piles, asked him for a price on the whole shebang, and his number was so low that I didn’t even haggle, just floated him the Benjamins immediately, right under the noses of two other pickers who had passed by because they were just scratching the surface rather than getting their hands dirty. Sometimes I grind my way to the proverbial needle in a haystack. I was going through a $0.50 cent box of PCs one morning and found a near-impossible single card I needed to complete a very tough racing set, just sitting there. I’ve not seen that card again on eBay or anywhere else and it has been over a year. I’ve pulled all sorts of great stuff out of junk boxes over the years from patient and relentless grinding; I am the proud owner of (later authenticated) signed photos of Roger Daltrey and Eddie Van Halen that came from digging on a pick. Rock on! So yeah, if I head home and I am not exhausted and filthy, I’m not trying.

That said, I am an impatient person by nature and one of the toughest lessons for me to absorb has been to not expect to kill it every time I go out. I will find a thousand bucks one week and then ten bucks the next, with the same effort. You just never know. The consolation prize is that a pile of $5 items is worth the same as a single $50 item. Over time, slow and steady good buys grow my collection or inventory just as well as a single big takedown; the fact is that picking for profit is reductive--it is all the same arithmetic in the end regardless of how I get there. I consider it a good pick if I find stuff valued at 2x-3x my cash outlay but sometimes it goes a lot better than that. Sometimes the multiple is huge, like a $150 item for $3. Sometimes, not. But if I regularly walk away from my picks having paid $50 for a stack of items that readily sells for $150, the net worth of my holdings soars, and when I sell, I will have a hell of a margin to work with.

One exercise I find helpful is to mindfully look at things. My eyes are my best picking tools, if I concentrate like a coyote on the prowl for a rabbit to kill. One time, I saw boxes of stuff on the back-up table that the dealer hadn’t even bothered to put out. I spotted what looked like an album of old cards in there and asked about it. The dealer told me that he hadn’t put it out because “no one wants old cards anyway”; I was so, so happy to prove him wrong. I bought the whole album and picked up some choice cards so nice that I kept them for my own collection. I spotted what no one else had because I was looking actively at everything.

When I find a deal, ‘Cobra Kai’ is the name of the game: strike first, strike hard, no mercy. If I hesitate, I lose, because another picker will get in there and make the deal. I saw one guy looking at some Sports Illustrated magazines. Early ones. The dealer quoted a price that was a decent amount of cash but way under market. He hemmed and hawed and said he’d think over the dealer’s ask. The instant he turned away I took the deal on the spot. I flipped them readily for a large profit.

A corollary rule to not hesitating is to try and buy it all. This is picking, not nit-picking. I cannot possibly assess a large box of mixed paper at a show and pull out every gem, so if there are good items that I can suss out and the dealer is reasonable, the better practice with the limited time and information at an informal market is to overbuy than to underbuy. I luck out more than I lose out by doing that. Sometimes I really luck out. One time I found a huge box of 1970s cards. A guy was looking them over already, but he was bitching that the dealer wanted to move them all and would not let him cherry pick the stars. I could see there were several thousand cards. I asked the dealer for the lot price, he told me; the per unit cost was pennies. I said “sold”, looked at the indecisive whiner, and said “put down my cards; I just bought this deal.”

Picking is relentlessly forward-looking, so I try my best not to look back on a bad decision, just clear my head and move on to the next deal. We all make choices. Sometimes I zig when I should’ve zagged. When I hit any kind of sale venue, I must decide how to approach it. Since I am on the spectrum (as my daughter puts it, I have “a touch of the ‘tism”), my inner organizational weirdo kicks in and I opt to go up and down the rows in an orderly manner for a first fast sweep, stopping at anything promising. That means I miss stuff in the rows I haven’t hit yet. One time at a flea market I just, JUST missed a full box of inserts and autographs that the ignorant dealer got out of a storage locker and sold for a pittance, because I went right instead of left when I got there. Go to the left and find a box of signed inserts worth a large multiple of the ask. Go to the right and find nothing. It happens. Gotta let that go and move on, hard as that can be.

It is paramount to be flexible. My rule is that I buy any item I find if the per-unit cost is right and I know I can turn it out profitably, regardless of whether I collect it or even have any interest in it. If I go to anything except a card show with the mindset that I will only buy sports cards, I am likely going home empty-handed and missing value right in front of me. As a corollary to that, I am also a big believer in stepping outside my core expertise when an opportunity presents itself, which means I need to know just enough about a lot of diverse collectibles to spot value. I am fortunate that I enjoy studying up on diverse collectibles. People collect old swizzle sticks? Really? Really. I may not be an expert on something but if I can determine that it looks good and the price is right, mine. Usually, I get it right; occasionally, I get burned. In recent years I’ve grabbed up giant collections of prewar Japanese postcards and photos, vintage automobile handbills and blotters, pin-ups, postcards, trade cards, even vintage valentines. The price was so low per unit that each deal was a no-brainer. On the other hand, I’ve gotten killed on comics and magazines; I’ve learned the hard way that the value of a ‘reader’ condition comic book, even from the Silver Age or Bronze Age, even from a good title like X-Men is shockingly low and rarely is enough to merit buying them, except for very specific issues. It just goes to show that picking profitably is not as easy as it sounds; sometimes it is counter-intuitive.

The corollary to being flexible is having the self-discipline to not make a bad deal, and that can be really hard to do when I am looking at a find in the wild because the temptation to grab it is soooo strong. One dealer at a flea market told me he had big run of football card sets including the 1980s sets with the big rookies and he only wanted $100 per set. Great, bring them. Turned out that he had 18 sets from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, and would not break the lot, so it was $100 for a 1975 Topps set but also $100 for a 1991 Pro Set. As a group, the $1800 ask did not pencil out, so I walked away. It was nerve-wracking because I have a sweet spot for my childhood sets from the 1970s, but I am not there to reminisce, I am there to make a profit. A corollary of not making a bad deal is not to forget the net value of items after selling costs and make break-even or very low margin deals. One vendor offered me a complete near mint set of 1977 Star Wars series 1 cards for $200. They sell readily for about $200-$250 a set in near mint condition. Even though I was tempted to grab ‘em because they were RIGHT THERE and they were pretty, I knew it was a money-loser when the selling costs are accounted for, and I walked away. A month later the same dealer sold me the set for $120 and I promptly turned it for a decent profit. Patience and self-discipline can be virtues just as much as decisiveness.

I have more pearls of wisdom (insert roll eyes emoji here) but we’ll save it for another time.