Collector Items That Aren't Worth Much (knives not included)

In 1985, at the height of the Cabbage Patch Kids craze, some of the larger and more prestigious Chicago Hospitals gave them hospital certificates of birth. If your sick child was hospitalized and you brought your child a Cabbage Patch doll, staff would give you a blank hospital certificate to complete with the doll's name, birthdate, gender, and other information. Such is the power of mass marketing.

In 1985 I was working at the Illinois Department of Public Aid's training office at 100 N. Western Avenue in Chicago. This location, at the intersection of two very different ethnic neighborhoods ( or "ghettos" if you prefer) and a huge Catholic Charities emergency shelter, was ideal for training new caseworkers. After a week of basic instruction, trainees were given small and manageable caseloads to learn the work while minimizing the damage done to peoples' lives. It also gave time to get to know our colleagues and become friends with a few, and that is how I learned this little story.

In 1985, a Public Aid recipient brought his sick child in hospital a Cabbage Patch doll, and was given a blank hospital certificate for the child's doll. In those bygone days, the Cook County Clerk's office was very slow at issuing birth certificates and hospital social workers did not usually take applications for Social Security numbers. Said malefactor reported the doll's hospital certificate to my colleague trainee as that of his newborn child and requested emergency Medicaid and Food Stamps. My friendly colleague requested a Social Security number for the doll. SSA has an office in Baltimore which handles these emergency applications: the case worker or social worker receives the SS number is less than an hour, and the applicant gets the SS card in the mail in 3 or 4 days. With the hospital certificate and the SS number, my colleague created a Medicaid case for the doll, and added the doll to the recipient's Food Stamp case. The recipient was told to return with a birth certificate ASAP within 8 weeks, and two reminder letters were sent. After the second reminder, the recipient came in without birth certificate and with this question: "How would it be if there was no child?"

HOW WOULD IT BE?

Illinois notified all hospitals that giving hospital birth certificates to dolls would cost them their license. Public Aid offices were not allowed to accept hospital certificates "until further notice" which turned out to be 10 weeks, and this caused distress and suffering to people with real newborn children who needed Medicaid for the hospital bill and their child's medical care. Medicaid was never billed for the Cabbage Patch doll, and its Medicaid case was immediately canceled. Social Security numbers cannot be withdrawn or rescinded, and the doll still has a Social Security account. There was a small overpayment to the recipient's Food Stamp account, I think the minimum issuance was $20 back then, and that was recouped by deducting it from his next issuance. Obviously he was never trusted on anything again. What he had done was a criminal offense, but these $20 cases are never pursued in court for obvious reasons.

Back in those days, defrauding Public Aid and the Food Stamps program was a sideline business for organized crime. Those cases were never reported in the press. You only heard of them by being professionally involved, and if anyone was caught, you could learn the details with a public record court search. That was not so easy back before public records were on the internet. I know of one case that would make a great film script.

Would a Cabbage Patch doll with a hospital birth certificate and Social Security card have collector value? Your thoughts are welcome.
 
Last edited:
Locutus D'Borg said:
I know people who collect some of these things and think they are sitting on a fortune. I was happy that knives aren't listed.

Click to expand...
I think the salient point that gets missed around collectibles is that long stretches of time are needed for the items to appreciate.

With today's flipper mindset people expect to see a massive increase in value overnight, but in reality you'll probably be long dead before your collection is worth more than you paid for it.
 
When I was young I used to work for a guy that had a friend that collected McDonalds Happy Meal toys. He had a spare bedroom full of them, dating back to the late 70s. Some of them, like the Star Trek stuff from the late 70s were "worth" thousands of dollars if they were still in the wrapper. Never underestimate human stupidity.
 
Anything made to be collectible won't be because too many of them were made. Collectible things are things that end up being relatively rare, oftentimes because they weren't that popular when they were made. If something is that rare, you probably don't have one.

My wife and I watch "Antiques Roadshow" sometimes and it is interesting to see the kinds of things that have value and the things that don't. I don't pretend that the numbers stated in the program are correct but I do consider relative number- if they think a painting is worth $50k and another painting is worth $50 then I'll consider that one is still worth a lot more than the other.
 
No one and I mean no one thought first generation Glocks would be a valuable and collectible as they have turned out to be. They made millions of them and they were meant to be used hard and made relatively cheaply. Good luck buying a first gen Glock 17 like new in box for a reasonable price.

Separately, my grandparents collected Hummel figurines, they were serious collectors (the type that traveled across the globe to participate in members only events at the Hummel headquarters). They had somewhere around 5,000 Hummels and they were actually selling for high prices in the 90s. Then the market tanked harder than maybe any collector market I’ve ever seen. Hummels that were selling for $300-$500 regularly are now $20-$50. The only ones that still command higher prices are the extremely rare figures. Too many produced and the older generation collecting them passed on with the younger generation having almost no interest.
 
John Phillips said:
No one and I mean no one thought first generation Glocks would be a valuable and collectible as they have turned out to be. They made millions of them and they were meant to be used hard and made relatively cheaply. Good luck buying a first gen Glock 17 like new in box for a reasonable price.
Click to expand...
The really popular thing that gets used really hard is a great precursor to something becoming very desirable.
 
Yesterday my dad had me look up the value of his Cheech & Chong album " The big Bambu " with the original rolling paper still in the sleeve which he was sure it had to be valuable because " you won't find one with the rolling paper still in it ".
It only took me a minute to find multiple examples on Ebay in equal condition with that rolling paper for under $30, I was right that paper was meant to be kept and most people kept it.


I have around 400 new in the card Hotwheels cars and counting, I've got a few error cars I know will have a little value eventually but that's not the point.
They're cool / fun to collect and only cost $1 so my dad started the collection for me when I was a kid and I just kept it going , I'm not in it for the money and will likely just give them to some kid when I'm old and no longer want them.

It's a shame so many people haven't figured out that most things meant to be collected will never be worth much.
 
Also, many years ago there was a large shipping container in the middle of the county dump.

Due to un-exploded ordinance being all over the island from WW11 days, it was common to find ammo, bombs, strafing clusters, etc all over the island.

People would find this stuff, then casually drop it off in the container.

Eventually people decided that was pretty dangerous, and the military finally came to clean up.

I may, or may not still have some stashed.

😳
 
I have a Dag Hammarskjöld upside-down stamp. It was printed in 1962 with the yellow background accidentally inverted. Someone found a sheet of them and thought he was going to get rich, but the post office said "nope" and printed another 40 million of them with the inverted background. If the finder had just kept his mouth shut for a few years I suppose he might actually have gotten rich from them (c.f. the inverted Jenny).
I got mine from a radio station that was giving them away as a promotion. I suppose it might still be worth the four cents face value! ;)
 
Never fell into to crazes of the eighties but I sure knew people that did. Fads are fads. I did collect a few date nails from railroad ties and glass insulators from power lines….you know practical stuff 🤣
 
I got a half dozen slide rules of various levels of complexity. I'm old enough that I know how to use them.
I bought them because as a young man who used a slide rule, I couldn't afford the super nice ones I drooled over. So when I got older and could afford it, I bought a couple, even though I no longer used them.

Nowadays I keep them because you know when tshtf and computers don't work, a slide rule will. ;)
 
I knew a guy who had a collection of records. Ran into him a few years ago - he sold them for a lot of money to cover medical bills.
 
knarfeng said:
I got a half dozen slide rules of various levels of complexity. I'm old enough that I know how to use them.
I bought them because as a young man who used a slide rule, I couldn't afford the super nice ones I drooled over. So when I got older and could afford it, I bought a couple, even though I no longer used them.

Nowadays I keep them because you know when tshtf and computers don't work, a slide rule will. ;)
Click to expand...
My BIL is a EE, with a MSEE and PhD, he has vintage slide rules and vintage HP calculators. He worked at Bell Labs, AT&T, before consulting for the DoD. He was adjunct professor at a large engineering school, his students had never seen a slide rule.
 
The way to ensure something will never gain significant value as a future collectible is to deem it such when new.

Limited edition. Collector's series. Etc.

Doing so ensures ample supplies of new in box mint from non-smoking home examples well into the future.

Most things average people collect are the definition of trinkets.

I won't get too far into my mountain climbing g analogy of collecting, but the gist of it is the accumulation phase is the climb, the summit is the display/enjoyment, and the downhill is the selling off phase.

Most collectors never realize when they reach the summit, nor when to head back down.

Gotta run, I am looking at another knife for the collection.

Screenshot_20230821-122009_Ghostery.jpg
 
This is an interesting thread :)

My grandmother had a couple of large figurines that my mother was always told were worth $20-30k a pop. After my grandmother died I had them valued on a website that I saw off of the dragons den lol, something like "valuemystuff dot com". They almost immediately had all of the information about them, turns out they were only worth $300-400 a piece.
 
SwissHeritageCo said:
This is an interesting thread :)

My grandmother had a couple of large figurines that my mother was always told were worth $20-30k a pop. After my grandmother died I had them valued on a website that I saw off of the dragons den lol, something like "valuemystuff dot com". They almost immediately had all of the information about them, turns out they were only worth $300-400 a piece.
Click to expand...
The figurines were just overvalued in case a someone broke one. It's a kind of insurance.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top