Tens of thousands. I guess the edited title isn’t wrong, in the same way as “more than 12” is a valid answer to most questions about how many of a given thing are in a city.
If I'm reading the middle correctly, that's exactly what happened: they got too used to selling period phones to Hollywood for a high price, and failed to note that while that business was wonderful, this is an intrinsically declining source of demand and that smartphones were busy wiping out their entire future market of 'period movies' (no one needs their prop phones for anything set in the past 20 years, soon, 30 years).
They had good cashflow, could blind themselves to the transition because they were so old, leaped at what used to be opportunities but now were being dumped on them as suckers - and that's how they wind up being the last holders of the fast-depreciating hot potatoes.
I'm amazed there's not a standard model converter box that plugs into RJ-11 that gives you a bluetooth connection and forwards the dialing numbers to your smartphone.
I think this is the key to their business at this point, advertising "all phones work with Bluetooth" so people can imagine actually being able to use them.
That could actually be a fun project and shouldn't be very difficult with an ESP32. I've done some PSTN design work (although it was 20+ years ago). Maybe I'll put it on the Winter project list :-)
They do have at least a webshop; and judging by the look of it, it's pretty old. But maybe poor SEO? I have an affection for old phones, and have window shopped on the interwebs from time to time, but I don't recall seeing this shop before.
I picked up my vintage phones at antique shops and thrift stores though, because internet prices are too high. Unfortunately, I can't get my rotary phone to work with my ATAs, even the ones that are supposed to; it works on POTS, but local POTS runs $60/month. I'm just not that committed, also not willing to pay for a pulse to tone converter. My newer old phone has tone dialing, but only on jacks with proper polarity; I might be willing to buy one of the components they made to rectify (hah) the situation, that's missing in my phone even though the model label indicates its there.
How so? Other than some of their trailers their inventory seems well organized and relevant to the business. Piles of old cars is not an unusual thing in rural areas, especially for older people. Nothing there appears to be outright trash.
It's a shame that things increase in value, and lose value, both monetarily and sentimentally. I had a couple of dozen Monopoly sets from the 1930s that I had obtained in college. They didn't take up that much space, and spent a lot of time sealed in plastic in the attic. Last year I tried to sell them but nobody wanted them, so I just threw them all away. It's sad, because I had a real passion for those, and really enjoyed them, but after 20 years they were just in the way.
Selling anything on eBay take a moderate bit of effort if (per another thread) you value your time at all. A long while back, I basically decided that if I couldn't get $50-100 for something it basically wasn't worth my time.
Yeah, the big awkward thing about selling things on eBay is that even if you value the things you're selling at $0 and so have 100% gross margin it's pretty easy to end up with it being a pretty underwhelming hourly wage. Depending on how much you value your time, giving things away via freecycle or a facebook group etc. can be "cheaper", although that has its own set of problems.
I live on a fairly busy road in a relatively rural area. My strategy for bulky stuff is to just put a "FREE" sign on it at the end of the driveway and that usually works within a few hours.
Electronics I just recycle and I mostly just shrug about other things or donate them.
I don't think it's a shame that there are multiple types of value which often disagree. In fact I'm quite happy that attempts to reduce experience into an optimization problem where each thing has a consistent untyped value are doomed to fail. If it were possible, it would've happened long ago and there would be no reason to bother with that awkward consciousness thing that we tend to do sometimes.
I'm sorry you were conflicted about throwing something precious away, but those are the conflicts that life is made of.
It's too late for your monopoly games, but for anyone looking to get rid of something it doesn't take much effort to search "donate X" and find a bunch of possible options other than the dump.
How did you try to sell them? Did you list them on eBay or did you try to contact some auction houses or did you look for some gaming groups or forums?
If they cleaned up and listed individually on eBay, they might actually make some money. There is still a great prop business for movie studios. Creating a niche site and marketing it to collectors with the internet would solve part of their sitting inventory problem.
I know they are old people and might not have the energy and knowledge to do it but there could be a potential solution. Maybe their grandchildren could do it...
Right. It's not even that they need to create a market. These things are already selling on eBay for hundreds of dollars. I guess it's a fairly common decor element for offices and homes. The same goes for old typewriters.
There are obsolete electronics that would be a lot harder to sell, for example CRT TVs - but phones are basically free money.
Seems like it could be stock for a nice little retirement side business (maybe for someone closer to 65 than to 90), hand-refurbishing old phones, and slowly trickling them out for sale on eBay and elsewhere, for premium prices.
A complication is that they have so much stock, you'd need to get (road-worthy) transportation to wherever you arranged storage accessible to you.
Maybe the collection could be parted out to multiple buyers, to make some of the higher-value lots sell more easily? For example, separate buyers for the lots of wood, candlestick, and novelty phones, then another buyer pays for right to pick over the remainder for 2 weeks, then maybe it's still worthwhile for an area scrap yard to haul away all remaining stock/trailers/fixtures for free?
If selling individual phones becomes too cumbersome (due to this couple's age, cost of storage space etc), then the obvious fix would be to sell bigger lots.
Some people will see a market niche in it (existing or not), and bet some $ on that to start a little side business.
But you have this 50 pound CRT that has to be connected to the right retro gamer. I think mine was small enough to be recycled for free but, over the years, I paid a fair bit to recycle CRTs.
In practice, it's a tiny market. CRTs are bulky, unsightly... and for the most part, really not as amazing as claimed. Plus, they are difficult to ship. Most of them end up in the landfill.
> There is still a great prop business for movie studios.
There aren't many, and they probably have what they need already. Wouldn't hurt to reach out. They might take 10 or 20 off your hands with a generous bulk discount.
They have a pricing problem. Not many people are going to buy an old analog phone in 2023 for $200 - $300. And the analog to bluetooth adapter they are selling is $80 and shouldn't cost more than $20.
If they dropped the prices to between $50 and $100 they might sell as a novelty.
Totally agree. Some of the older stuff used to be worth money, but seems like they were not focused on sales/marketing.
Just to haul it all off to the dump would cost a fair amount.
I think they need to hire a zoomer on commission to promote the phones on TikTok and shilling them away with the bluetooth adapter being free. Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in.
> Tie this in with a giant telephone art project to draw folks in.
Short story contest: All the phones ring at once.. but why, and who is on the other end?? Also, classic telephones are the only way to enter/exit the Matrix, so with the decline of the payphone elsewhere this guy is sitting on a type of mass-transit system.
You get the random person who will drop a few bucks on old telephony/computer/electronic gear for the novelty/nostalgia. But it's not really a business at scale; there are only so many geeks looking to pair money burning holes in their pockets with impractical equipment. I know I have some stuff in my garage that someone probably wants and which I'd give them for free even but connecting with someone--especially outside of a city--is hard and I'm not willing to go to much effort.
Yeah I'm sympathetic but this feels like something you see over and over -- rather than adapt to reduced demand / value of your product by lowering prices, just throw your hands in the air and declare that you're stuck with this stuff forever.
See the perpetually for sale, perpetually overpriced cars of Craigslist.
"throwing your hands in the air" is a form of advertising. "Oh poor me, will anyone rid me of all this stock? I'm so desperate by now, I'm willing to sell it for the low low price of...".
They just had free advertising in a newspaper. That will likely help them move quite a bit of phones.
> "throwing your hands in the air" is a form of advertising. "Oh poor me, will anyone rid me of all this stock? I'm so desperate by now, I'm willing to sell it for the low low price of..."
Yep. I would consider driving up there to have a look and take a few off their hands... but at those prices, nope. They're going to have to blow these things out well under $100 each.
There's probably more supply than demand. The price will go down to the point of their warehouse costs and opportunity cost of running the business. It's a passion business, so low.
Several problems here. They are both hoarders to some extent. They see value in something that is dear to them but junk to most of us. They continued to acquire stock over the years without any plan to get rid of what they had. Children have no interest in getting involved, probably tired of trying to get through to them and not being able to change their behavior, resigned to just waiting for them to pass and throwing it all away. It really is a kind of abuse left to the children to deal with, a financial and logistical nightmare.
At this point everything they have should be offered to every museum across the country for free or a tax write off. What is left, sort through and keep 1 of everything worth keeping. The rest should probably get recycled consider there is copper and possibly other metals worth something.
There are 1000's of these kinds of scenarios across the country. Old folks who just can't let shit go.
> It’s the same challenges faced by others who deal in antiques like roll-top desks, sets of china, oil lamps, armoires and salt and pepper shakers.
What has changed in our society that these things are no longer valued?
A simple hypothesis would be that, over time, interest in any particular item waxes and wanes. But to me it feels like fundamental values in society have changed, and the lack of interest in these items is sympomatic.
Perhaps as we have shifted radically and quickly to hyper-capitalistism / objectivism as our truth, and in a reactionary surge we seem to ridicule everything else, there is no room now for these things.
Antiques are only interesting as long as there are people who remember them when they weren’t antique - my father’s father’s generation had roll-top desks as a normalish office accessory, so he’d be interested in them.
To me they’re only moderately interesting because he had one.
Same for things like baseball cards and celebrity memorabilia. People need to remember the person to care, or it needs to be something "defining" like a Babe Ruth card or something tied to the founding of the US.
Indeed. This also explains the popularity lately of vintage (1970s/1980s) computers. I occasionally think it would be fun to have the same Macintosh SE I had as a kid, but can’t bring myself to pay the high prices that they’re going for now (at least for ones in fully working condition).
> There is some revival in oil and kerosene lamps.
As another poster mentioned: mass production lowering cost, and newer products like LEDs replacing oil lamps.
But there's also a kind of fashion aspect. Some gear might be stuff that nobody wants today. And then it features prominently in a box-office movie hit, some people dive into it on 'the socials', and before you know it, the same items fetch crazy prizes on eBay, Etsy & co.
But you can't predict this. Storage & maintenance has an ongoing cost. And some goods never have a revival no matter how old or unique. Worthless now, worthless 20, 30, 50y from now.
You could almost say (for traders of such inventory) there's a kind of gambling aspect to it.
Roll-top desks are inconveniently short for monitors, and inconveniently small for most piecework/quilting/etcetera.
Are old china sets dishwasher safe? Microwave safe? I'd assume people do a lot less formal entertaining these days, and if they do, outside of a holiday, they're probably more likely to go out to eat, and have games or movies at home along with appetizers.
Outside of a non-wired cabin there's not much reason for an oil lamp. Modern LED lamps can last as long as oil lamps, and the storage space for the batteries is probably smaller than for the equivalent amount of oil. Plus there are no mantles to replace. Eventually the LED will die, but it would probably take years before that happens unless there's a defect or accident.
In the rentals I've been in, closet organizers have allowed more space than armoires, and also allow the clothes to breathe.
Some people still buy bulk salt and pepper, but the smaller canisters sold at stores that most people buy come with built in shaker tops.
Old china sets: very hard to have confidence they don't use lead-based glazing that will leach with some foods / heating. I sold my mom's china and crystal for this reason.
One issue is that housing prices have squeezed out budgets for furnishings. Everyone has a million-dollar house (two million, in my town) full of Ikea. I, myself, have a house that I got for much much less, full of fancy-ass Italian designer furniture, because at that time I had plenty of money left over after paying for housing. The dealer of said furniture went out of business, though, as the housing crisis accelerated.
Recently I lived for a bit in Paris and I noticed there are furniture and interior design shops all over the place. There are almost none left in the Bay Area.
I disagree a bit because if you can afford a $2M home, $20k isn't that much, but can buy enough nice furniture. It's probably a bigger deal when it's a $400k house, but the furniture would still be $20k.
Maybe but I don't think that is the problem with their rebuttal. In reality the fraction of income people are spending on housing is going up. Their incomes are not proportional to their housing costs.
More renters, too. A home owner, unless they are forced to move constantly, will often have a frozen mortgage payment which will allow the purchase of more expensive furnishings in later years. For renters the rent will keep increasing, eating up the increase in income.
But that hypothetical 20% down payment was in the stock market averaging 9% returns. Real estate in normal (not Bay Area) markets is more like 4%, but that doesn't include property tax or maintenance. The math isn't as clearly advantageous as conventional wisdom likes to claim, assuming you have the restraint to invest the money.
Simply put, mass production. The cost (and value) of nearly all manufactured goods have dramatically fallen relative to average incomes. Consumers have access to a much wider range of goods with a much wider range of attributes. In the global west (and increasingly in middle-income Asia) we live in an age of abundance. I think it's overwhelmingly a positive thing that we no longer cherish the few possessions that we have, because we have built a world in which increasingly large numbers of people have the luxury of choice.
I don't want an antique set of china, because my dishwasher will probably ruin it. I don't want silver salt and pepper shakers, because I prefer freshly ground black pepper and there are a much wider range of condiments that might go on my table. I don't want a roll-top desk, because my office is oriented around a computer rather than papers.
Like a rotary telephone, most of these objects were designed to serve the needs of people who lived very different lives to me. Unlike previous generations, I have the privilege of being able to very cheaply buy things that suit my needs, rather than having to settle for what I can afford, what I am gifted or what I inherit. If you happen to value any of those things, then you're in luck - they're available in abundance, like most things you might want to own.
> What has changed in our society that these things are no longer valued?
Utility. Not much else.
> it feels like fundamental values in society have changed, and the lack of interest in these items is symptomatic.
Not really. I think, in this case, it's just progress marching forward. As better-functioning devices emerge, the less useful ones slowly go away. Over a century plus, the phone evolved, and an earpiece you hold one-handed or could squeeze between your shoulder and ear did in the candlestick in. Touch-tone did in rotary and cordless was eating away at corded, and then mobile phones have mostly obsoleted the landline phone completely at this point.
> shifted radically and quickly to hyper-capitalistism / objectivism as our truth
I'm not sure that is the case. Being able to have both hands free while talking was so useful; by the time I was born, a candlestick phone was almost an absurd anachronism. By the time I was in high school, almost everyone was using cordless phones with a ~200' range. By the time I left college, everyone had a phone in their pocket. And each time, the tech made life measurably better.
> in a reactionary surge we seem to ridicule everything else, there is no room now for these things.
I'm not sure that's the case. Often, obsolete things are preserved as a source of inspiration, nostalgia and sometimes humor. The image of trying to operate a candlestick phone one-handed is comical because the device was a RADICAL improvement, but implemented in a way that made it very difficult to use. My first "mobile" phone weighed nine pounds and was so big it came with a lunch-box-size duffel bag to hold the transceiver and battery. When my contract was renewed two years later, I moved on to a pocket-size phone. It worked better, had about ten times the battery life, and didn't require a duffel bag to hike it around. When I talk to people who worked with me back in the early 90s, we laugh about the bag phones. We all made a lot of business happen with them, but the next iteration made the bag phone almost so difficult it was absurd.
I have little sympathy for them, if that's what we're supposed to feel. Maybe the article was poorly written but it seems like "they've tried nothing and are all out of ideas".
I would appreciate it if stories like this continue to make headlines. Let them be a warning to all our parents. No doubt this will end up being an unpleasant mess for their children to clean up.
> an unpleasant mess for their children to clean up
People massively underestimate the amount of pain and discomfort it causes to have to sort out a house filled with useless stuff, ON TOP of the GREAT pain of losing a parent.
When my grandma died, 6 adults (her 3 kids and spouses) were cleaning a 50 sqm flat for a week. The amount of worthless paperwork, magazines, newspapers, tchotchkes, bank statements from 40 years ago.. clothes/towels/bed-sheets for 10 people.. unreasonable volume of stuff (she was not a hoarder per se - the flat was spotless and you could easily walk from room to room), just needing enormous cleaning/maintenance and offering zero value.
I believe we should all check out lists like "how to prepare for dying" with our elder parents. It's a bit morbid and not a fun discussion for the Sunday dinner, but hey.. business before pleasure..
How many have tried? Gently asking if this or that is needed indeed? Of course arrogantly claiming that they live in the middle of junkyard doesn't get anybody anywhere.
We're currently dealing with this with my grandmother. She is absolutely not okay with anything being removed from her house, and the best we've come up with is to periodically have one or two people organize her attic and have a clear set of things which we know we need to go through when she dies and a set of boxes we know we can just toss. Even with this, it's looking like weeks of work.
In dealing with a person (young, old, or MYSELF), I find it much more efficient to use the 3 piles technique:
Pile 1: Definitely keeping
Pile 2: Not sure, decide later, no pressure
Pile 3: Definitely tossing
I've had a small number of elderly people go from, "STOP TOUCHING MY STUFF! I WANT IT ALL!" to getting rid of so much, I'm sitting there trying to save some of it.
This technique starts with no requirement that anything is tossed. The owner must simply touch each thing and choose a pile. Truly, no pressure and if they choose to keep every little thing, that's their choice.
The family is clearing and bringing stuff into the inbound pile for the elderly person. It works even better if there's a grandchild around to help the sorter.
The biggest thing this does, is stop the fights over every single object that go like:
Kid: Mom, do you want to keep this?
Mom: YES
Kid: BUT WHY?! It's trash!
- 10 minutes of arguing and it goes one way or another
- repeat for each and every item in someone's home
- Everyone is exhausted and angry after an hour or two
I've seen massive family drama turn into a relatively enjoyable afternoon with Grandma sharing memories with her grandchild, while 3-4 adults clear an entire garage of stuff, almost all of which wound up going to the trash with Grandma's consent.
As others have pointed out the problem isn't demand, it's pricing. I watch a few auction sites for antique phones. They always sell. The problem is they sell for about half of what Phoneco wants.
If they listed their inventory on eBay over a period of a few years with no reserve they could easily sell everything.
I'd buy a pay phone from them today if the price was right. It's not.
High prices are part of the problem, but I don't doubt that this stuff could sell at these high prices if they were able to keep them on offer long enough. If old phones aren't cool right now they will be again soon enough. More likely somebody is going to make a killing in the estate sale.
The website could use a little work. I actually like the old school design, but higher rez photos, re-organization (there are five different places for novelty phones! https://www.phonecoinc.com/list.asp?map=1), and removing sold out models (or at least moving them to their own section) would make using it a lot easier.
Well, Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
"I got forty red-white-and-blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don't ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things?"
And Louie the King said, "Let me think for a minute, son"
Then he said, "Yes, I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61"
That is an amazing collection. Many of them have been refurbished and fixed. I don't think the prices are that high. There are many unique pieces, and compared to the price of other things out there, prices ok. There is some solid stuff, with real build quality.
Shipping might be a problem.
Definitely gives one ideas for cool projects!
https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1159799-tumblr
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