Now it can be told: yesterday, I experienced one of the greatest triumphs I have ever known in the short span of my collecting diecast cars.
I found my Holy Grail, the item I had passed up last December only to find it gone the next day. I found the item I had combed seven (or was it eight?) SMs, four Rustan'ses, four Robinsonses and about a dozen hobby stores besides looking for: a Big Time Muscle Shelby Cobra 427 S/C in 1:64, colored silver with two big black stripes down the middle. I found it just after I had given up hope, having spent the weekend looking for it in Fairview, of all places. I found it at Robinson's Galleria, which is right beside my office, which is strange considering I had already looked there without success.
Life is just full of irony. In the end, I didn't even have to go to all those malls and stores all over town (though in the process I made some phenomenal finds; in going back to RAM's I ended up finding a Ferrari F430 Dropstars, which is so hard to find it practically attained the status of Unicorn as far as I was concerned, and it was in the course of my search that I found the red and white Shelby Cobra 427s, so all things considered there were some high points in the search besides its eventual culmination).
This is the joy of collecting; expending time and effort to find something and to finally, finally have that effort pay off. Would I have felt as gratified if I'd found the item somewhere far flung like Dasmarinas, Cavite? I don't really know, and I don't really care. The point is that I paid for it what I wanted to pay for it, and even though there were a lot of other extraneous expenses (gas, fare, parking) involved, these were expenses of the hunt, which, more than just adding another toy to the pile, is what makes collecting truly worthwhile.
It gratifies me now to go back to eBay and see those psychos selling the item for $12.00 or something ridiculous like that. I feel particularly smug when I log onto eBay Philippines and see the schmuck trying to hawk a pair of blue and silver Big Time Muscle Shelbys for P800.00. That's a mark-up of 100% on each car, assuming he divided the price between the two of them. It gratifies me when I see that no one's taken him up on his price so far. It means no one's interested in getting ripped off by some avaricious scalper who probably bought out all of the Shelby Cobras in his general vicinity so he could sell them for a fortune online.
For people like this I have two words: fuck you. You greedy bastards give collectors a bad name and should be ashamed of yourselves for trying to take advantage of people trying to pursue their hobby, especially by posting hype like "Very Hard to Find." It's not the price you put on the cars that pisses me off; hell, I shelled out P500 the other day for the F430 I was fairly sure I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else, even online. It's that you thought you could get away with doubling the price of cars that you probably got at P200.00 each. In my search I probably spent easily more than the price you were asking for just looking for those cars, but at least I didn't hand the money over to you, thereby rewarding your speculation.
I know that's the way the world works: he who has rare items can jack up the price all he wants, but these people are just like those assholes who charge an arm and a leg for those crappy 1:64 Hot Wheels Ferraris, with one crucial difference: their product is still on the market at its original price. There are still Shelby 427 S/Cs in SM malls scattered throughout not just Metro Manila but the whole country, and while they're out there, nobody is going to pay such a ludicrous price (which is just a STARTING BID). So unless this guy is willing to go to far-flung places like Batangas or Pampanga, or hell, even Baguio, just to make sure these items are really out of stock, he shouldn't try to pull a fast one on people. Heck, I know for a fact that there are actual collectors (not scalpers) who have some extra Cobras in their larder who are willing to unload them for a lot and I mean a LOT less. They know that the collector community can be a very pleasant one and shouldn't be trying to cut each other's throats with ridiculous prices.
THIS is the greatest victory a collector can aspire for: to find exactly what he's looking for and pay exactly what he wants to pay for it.
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