I was at the post shipping some items when in came a man with a stack of boxes. The boxes were all covered in stamps. Seems what he does is buy large stamp collections on ebay and use them for postage! The reason why this works is people who inherit stamp collections want money not the stamps. Thus when they sell the collection most times they sell at a discount over face value. After a quick review on ebay I realized I could not recreate this scenario for my own shipping needs. Any ideas why students? A look at ebay quickly reveals why. You have to sort through a large number of junky stamp auctions to do this trick. The only way you do this is to be very interested in stamp collecting yourself. It is my guess that this fellow probably sifts through collections and looks for any gems and removes them before using the more ordinary stamps for postage. I would not be surprised if he is selling some of these winnowed collections again on ebay. The size of boxes he ships are large enough that if he is doing this then he is selling large notebooks full of them. Likely more than one book too.
The world is full of arbitrages. Some of them require a genuine interest. I find stamps boring to the extreme.
2 Comments
That is… made out of awesome! I ship ebay stuff all the time, mostly Magic: the Gathering cards, because it makes for a nice source of fun money and helps offset the price of the hobby. Postage is a constant thorn in my side. The MTG hobby is similar in many ways to stamp collecting… where and why certain pieces are valuable, the difference between an error print and the scarcity of a routine shortprint, and so on. Fantastic find, Fred!
-Mike
Went and google’d “gathering cards” …looks like a collectible of some sort. Collectibles burn ALOT of time they do!