I agree with most of the comments you made in your original post, Glenn, but I would like to make a few comments and raise a few questions regarding the price guides.

First an obvious question:

What values should the price guide reflect? If a chip regularly sells on eBay for, say, $100 and it is widely priced (and maybe sold) out of dealers’ binders for $150 (probably to people who don’t use eBay), which value would you prefer to see? My own opinion is that you should consider the two to be analogs of wholesale and retail respectively and use the retail price as a guideline. That said, if dealers can normally sell a given chip for $150 out of their binders, what “value” should the price guides reflect? Do you want people buying the chip for $150 to feel that they are buying it at “book value” or should they feel they’re buying it at a discounted price?

Now some comments:

The “value” of anything is related to supply and demand. If there are currently 10 collectors in the hobby buying chips in the $5,000+ range and 6 months from now some more deep-pocket collectors enter the hobby to change that number to 25, what will that do to the “values” of high-end chips? It will obviously increase them, as the demand will go up while the supply stays the same. In a static hobby, the prices realized on chip sales will trend downwards as there is less and less competition for a given chip as more collectors have it in their collections. As more collectors flow into the hobby, the chips in their price ranges will trend upwards (keeping the supply end static.)

Another phenomenon that happens, which is widely ignored in discussions of devaluations, is the “sell-off” of finds. At one time, for example, Doug Saito had all of the $5 Bucket Of Blood chips and was selling them for $65. When he was out of them, when they were all locked up in collections, the price spiked back up and more or less remains at the higher (true) level. Of course, while the “finds” are still being sold off, an artificially low level gets established and should be considered only a temporary value. (So, when Dale Stuart runs out of one or more flavors of his Tropicana chips, they’ll find their “true” level.)

Some chips sell remarkably consistently on eBay while others vary wildly, even when there is a lot of activity (ie: a big supply.) How do you pin down values for those? As an example, for the $5 New Frontier mustard rectangle mold, two recent consecutive eBay auctions for chips in virtually identical condition (as all of them are) ended in sales of $154 and $40. Where would you place the value?

Someone in your initial thread noted that the mode in the hobby is that collections are being sold off, and that this should have an effect on values. I don’t understand this at all. What the sales of the Allan Myers and Platinum collections did was to make many desirable chips available to the hobby… one at a time. As you say, there were certainly many chips in each collection that we’ve not seen in previous auctions or sales and it gave us a handle on their desirability, but I don’t believe that the sales of either collection decreased the value of a single chip or that these two sales are indicative of any trend in the hobby overall.

That said, I completely agree with your “one buyer” assessment. You’re right on the money with that and, as such, the buyer and circumstances of sales needs to be considered as well. The good thing about auctions as opposed to private sales, though, is that, in most formats there is an underbidder, which dilutes the “one buyer” factor to an extent.

As for the need for the publication of future price guides, I’ll offer what I feel are two more compelling reasons:

First, The Chip Rack is, I believe, most widely used as a check list. Its format, with separate lines for variations and individual roulette chips, lends itself to that type of use and as such, is valuable to those of us that collect current chips.

The second reason is that I feel that there are MANY assumptions made in the price guides that have been shown to be false by those of those who attend chip shows and/or track eBay auctions. Here’s an example:

There is a chip that I’ve been looking for for years. It is a $5 chip from the Mapes-Money Tree, an orange hat & cane mold with the inscription “Non-Negotiable – Pit”. It is listed in The Chip Rack as N2805 with an “E” value, and in Campiglia & Wells as having a value of $5 in slightly used condition with a rarity of R-2, indicating a population of over 750 chips. The only one I’ve ever seen to prove to me that it exists is a scan of one in hideous condition that Don Lueders posted a while back while lamenting that he could not find another one. I’ve never seen one in a dealer’s binder, and I’ve never seen one on eBay. Why do the authors of the price guides see the need to conform the value of this chip to the others in the series? Do they know of some boxes somewhere, or had they simply made an assumption based on what they knew about the other chips? There are many more examples of this that I could point to, and I’m sure that they’re all based on assumptions as well. I believe that there exists at least some evidence regarding the populations of many chips that are drastically undervalued in the guide books.

To say it another way, I’m sure that many people here have been frustrated combing the Convention bourse floor looking for a particular “C” chip in every dealer binder and not being able to find it. When that happens, I would think that the guides are just wrong in many cases.

I think the challenges of the authors of the two major guides are quite different. The Chip Rack guys need to keep track of each and every chip that is issued. Assigning values is pretty much rote for those, yet keeping current is probably pretty daunting. On the other hand, the higher-end stuff they can just lump into the “Z9” category and leave it at that. C&W, on the other hand, face a much tougher job, and that is factoring in the “one buyer” factor. There are many forces at work there and it’s something I would not want to tackle.

And finally, regarding those who cite guide book values, there are admittedly some heinous practices being perpetrated by some sellers. Implying that a chip is more valuable due to the age of the guide books is deceptive, at best, but I see far worse on a consistent basis. Those citing the guide book prices for the Tropicana chips, as an example, when they are completely aware of the recent finds of these, are far worse to me. But worst yet, as an example, is the *&%$# who started selling the River Queen chips as “rare Las Vegas…” stating that he has just a couple of each, raping the early buyers for 500 bucks while the auctions of the 35th of the chip goes unsold at $49. That type needs to be drummed from the hobby.