Saying goodbye to a hobby

And what a hobby it was.

Been collecting and selling vintage toys and collectibles for over 20 years.

In addition to selling at shows and in malls, for most of those 20 years I sold through my web store, vintage-toys.com, and through eBay, because of vintage-toys.com.  Jules set the web store up a way that I could send items from the store to eBay, and I did pretty well for several years.

It was a hobby/business.  And it was reasonably successful, given that it was what it was, and not my primary source of income.  But then the business part of the hobby/business started failing.   The reasons are due to eBay becoming more interested in retail businesses than in the little guy who built the company, and placing more demands on the small, individual sellers like me.  Fees increased from about 5% of sales to close to 20%.  You need a lot of volume to compensate for this amount of overhead. 

I used to get a lot of action through Google searches as well, but that fell off the table about a year ago.  Google wants businesses that will pay for ads, and with my little business, ads didn't make sense.  The items I sold were often one of a kind.

So then it became, for a few years, a hobby and not a hobby/business.

So many fond memories.  The items I sold often had special meaning to people--a decoration that had been in one woman's father's dentist office in the 1950s, a toy truck that a man bought as his son's high school graduation gift to replace the exact one he ran over when his son was five, postcards of motels in which people had their childhood homes, and it went on and on.

My most meaningful experience with an item was actually not through the web site, but was in the late 90s when I was selling at a show.  I had a toy Mattel gun lying on one of my tables.  A man of about 60 stopped, looked at it, picked it up, and started talking--sort of to me, but sort of just talking.  He talked about how much the gun was like what they called a "Grease Gun" when he was fighting in Korea.  He said they would have to drive the North Koreans out of caves with this gun--they would be far back in the caves watching for the American soldiers to expose themselves in the light of the opening of the cave.  So, to prevent this, the American soldiers would fire short bursts in to the cave. The short bursts were necessary because, according to him, the gun often jammed.

After reminiscing for awhile, he sat the toy back down on the table, looked at me, said "thank you," and slowly walked away.  I stood there stunned.  He was thanking me?  After what he did?  I have wished so many times since then that I had kept my wits about me to be able to tell him what his story did for me.

These were the things I sold.  Items that brought back memories.  People would send me their stories, seeing me as a friend who had helped connect them with something meaningful from their past.  I loved it.

I also loved buying the items at auctions.  Auctions were a game.  You were trying to beat the auctioneer and the other bidders.  The rules were clear and open.  I loved the challenge.  Sometimes I really "won," and sometimes the bear got me.  But it was always fun.

I loved the smell and feel of old items.  And the graphics on boxes, bottles, toys, and so on were much better than what one currently sees.

But after I moved to Whidbey Island I stopped buying more things, just planning on selling for 10-20 years.  I would have too except that, as I said, the selling landscape for me changed.  And more importantly, I found other activities that I enjoyed equally.  I didn't really get tired of doing it so much as I ran out of time with all of the other meaningful things I do--Vicky and I cycle, hike, fix up our home, take road trips for much of the year, and dance.  And a biggie is that I now have grandchildren.

So in another week I am taking all of the rest of my inventory to an action.  Everything is packed in boxes ready to go:

Jules shut down my web site.  One minute it was there....

and the next minute it was gone, forever, and this is what is there instead:

Store room after the boxes were taken to an auction house:

 

A lot of life is saying good by to things--to people, to experiences, to jobs, to things, and to hobbies.

Good by vintage-toys.com.