Mixture Reviews

Review of Harris World Wide stamp bag.

Remember the World-Wide Harris Stamp bags from your youth? Yes, they are still around and as close as your local Hobby Lobby Store. There is a small section in each Hobby Lobby Store devoted to coins and stamps. There are a couple Harris bags, the premium bag has a small packet of US stamps off paper in it, steer clear of that one. One is a bag of US stamps on paper that I have not looked at. The one to get is the green wold wide stamp bag that says "Super Value" 300 genuine wold-wide stamps on it. The retail price is $6.99. It is a better deal if you can use one of Hobby Lobby's 40% coupons on it.

So what you get for your $7 or $4.50 with the coupon? You get a hair over 2 ounces of world stamps on paper. Few if any US stamps will be in the bag. They will not be close cut and there will be duplicates. They stamps are rolled up with a cardboard insert so at first the stamps will be curled and there will be some damaged ones. Some of the most common stamps I have seen are the 34-cent and 36 cent Canada Parliament building definitive stamps and oodles of Great Britain Machine Head stamps. There will be some commemoratives too and this is of course what one is fishing for. The first bag I bought I was pleasantly surprised to find a good number of German Commemoratives from 2006-2009. Some with a catalog value of $2 here and there. Of course I ran out to get another bag and alas, the loot wasn't as good but still there were a dozen or so interesting commemoratives I still needed. There seem to be a quite a variety of Machine Heads too and a definitive picker would enjoy that. Some harder to find countries do appear from time to time like modern postally used Faroe Islands, Turkey and Jordan.

So is it worth it? Yes, you bet from the sheer fun value of it and the fact that you can still buy a bag of stamps at a brick and mortar store. You could also order a bag online. I got a couple bags for Christmas and they were fun to go through and I passed the extras on to other collectors to pick through. If you are an advanced collector, you may be happier with a mixture from a mixture dealer source and I will review one of those next.

Harris 300 Green Stamp Bag.

Pros: Easy to find, Can use 40% coupon at Hobby Lobby, Might have some fun stamps. Good for a non-collector to buy as a gift for a collector. You will find modern postally used stamps.

Cons: Lots of duplication, poorly cut stamps. Some Stamps with creases and tears.

Feel free to add your own comments!

In my day, those bags were at Woolworths. Did you buy a bag, filled with almost limitless possibilities? Or choose a few cello-wrapped cardboard sheets with stamps you could see, instead? Decisions, decisions.

Don't even get me started on the Golden Galleons.

Wow memories! I remember the bags that I bought were orange. HE Harris was sold (to General Mills in the ate 70s?) so who is HE Harris now?

I remember getting those at Woolworths also. Brings back memories for sure.

Thanks for the post landoquakes[up. It reminded of where it all began.

Dianne

Here is my stamp collection ,much easier to keep it in the original package .

A small sub-section of Whitman Publishing (the coin folder people) is the last part of HE Harris & Co.:




At least they still sell their Albums and Supplements -- and even those bags of stamps direct:

https://www.whitman.com/store/Inven...gs-and-Cubes

A brief summary of the demise of HE Harris & Co. and the General Mills sale can be found here:

http://www.apfelbauminc.com/blog/wh...-h-e-harris/

The one I remember is the one that floortrader scanned.

When I was a kid, my parents bought us a bag of 1000 stamps for $1.00 and my brother, sister and I shared them. They asked us to share because they weren't sure if we were really interested in stamps or not. It turned out that I was the one that was

Chimo

Bujutsu

A few years ago ,I remember seeing a stamp lot up for auction that was the remainder of the H.E.Harris reference inventory and what was left of the stock books . They were at Manning or Kellher for auction.

Back in the '70s-'80s during my formative years, there was a farmer/flea market in Gilbertsville, PA named "Zern's" that was open Fridays and Saturdays. It wasn't your traditional agriculture-based farmers market per se, although there was that aspect as well. The ginormous interior consisted of semi-permanent stalls that weekend merchants would lease and customize. Everything from cheap electronics to off-the-wall imports, confectionery dealers, butchers, bakers, tools, automotive supplies, record stores, housewares... and about every collectible under the sun. Also outdoor booths where people would just back up their truck and unload stuff to sell.

Basically a huge garage sale every weekend, with some consistency and some impromptu appearances. There was also an antiques auction and auto auction every weekend as well.

There were 3 regular coin dealers that I recall, 2 regular stamp dealers, as well as a host of others that also had coins and stamps as part of their mish mash. It was hawg heaven for a kid that collected stuff.

One stamp dealer had quart-sized plastic bag lots that you could buy that covered various areas, including worldwide bag lots that weren't just kiloware, but leftovers/scrapings from collections, so there was a lot of 19th century and other off paper stuff in the mix.

Another dealer had a huge steamer trunk absolutely jam packed full of stamps that you could buy for 3 cents each. There were also weekly bid boards for better sets/singles.

Those were the days. For someone who loves scrounging or "dumpster diving" looking for the diamond in the rough, it was nirvana.

Sadly long gone.

Good review. I'm a sucker for stamp packets and I've wondered what was in these when I've seen them in Hobby Lobby. I buy probably 2 or 3 packets a week from various sources. I'm like a kid at Christmas every time I open one. Most packets are between 2 and 5 cents or so apiece. How can you go wrong?

Re:


I would have expected mostly older, common-as-dirt stamps, but recent German commems aren't too surprising. German kiloware is the cheapest and most plentiful there is. It can be had for as little as $10 a pound and I've soaked close to 15 pounds of it in the last year. As far as recent stamps go, used "high-value" German stamps (especially the self-adhesive 1.45 Euro denominations) are among the most overvalued stamps in the catalog. If you buy a pound of German kiloware, you'll end up with literally hundreds of those $2.00 CV stamps, and at a penny apiece or less. I've literally got several bundles of 100 of them that I'm not sure what to do with.

I got a story that some would not believe -----THE GOLDEN AGE OF STAMP BUYING -----you may think this GOLDEN AGE was 100 years ago or during a different generation . But the time period to buy was just a little more than 15 years ago . From 1986 until E-BAY came a long ,I was buying millions of stamps ,yes I said millions .
There was a time when you could fill up your car with boxes and boxes of stamps including albums ,stock books and dealer cards all for less than $350.00 sometimes I spend as much as $600.00 for huge amount of boxes .The only competition were old retire guys who would bid just the opening bid and then stop .
There was way more lots than I could handle and sort thru before the next auction ,it wasn't about money ,it was where to put the stuff . During that time I was getting so much albums and complete sets of International that I took to cutting up the pages so I could sell them by the cigar full of stamps for $9.00. Every week pull out the better stamps and then watch Nightline and cut up another album at night . I was sell a few hundred boxes each year and keeping the better stamps .Truly the GOLDEN AGE ,then ebay came along and the junk lot prices went thru the roof and what I was selling for a penny each started to go for 5 or 6 cents each on ebay if placed on stocksheets and pictured on ebay .It was golden because the profit between the buying and selling was so short .

floortrader,

Not sure what to make of this. I think most would agree that ebay brought people into the market as buyers that were not in it before. So this demand caused prices to rise. But I doubt that profit rose all that much (I really do not understand what you are saying when you say "the profit...was so short" -- profit is not a unit of time, it is either "high" or "low") as the cost of supply rose also. I'm sure you are familiar with "arbitrage." When ebay came along it just enabled arbitrage on a larger scale.

Let me explain it this way -----I was purchasing bulk material of junk lots ,dealer remainers ,collections and huge mixture lots for many times less than a penny a stamp .This was not all common or on paper mixture stuff ,a lot of it was dealer inventory stuff like mnh new issues ,black dealer cards ,albums with mounted stamps , what today it is collectible material and it was cheap when I purchased it .
Within a few years this material was selling on ebay for 5 times what I was buying it for . Never ---Never in the history of stamp collecting did we ever see that kind of price raise of 500% for general material ,sure someone can point out a hot area that had those types of price changes but never that general across the board increases for huge profit after ebay came on the scene. I was selling those $9.00 cigar box lots which sold through ads in Linn Stamp News for $30.00 to $45.00 on ebay within a few years .Making huge profits but turned around and purchased higher quality material at public auctions .
There was no "arbitrage" prices of material at public stamp auctions shot up quickly once the ebay sellers started to look for supply sources ,it was at that time I got to bid against NYSTAMPS and ANTONY and others ,they were just blowing away all the old timers and me included with their crazy bidding .

Great responses here. Yup, Southpaw is right that the original bags were orange. I remember the plastic orange ones in the early 80's that were sold at Woolworth's. It was a hard decision to buy a packet or a bag. I usually wound up buying a bag for the mystery. TheArtfulhinger is correct that German kiloware is one of the more easier to find kiloware out there. Modern France seems to be harder to find (at least to me) and this will be the subject of mixture #2 review. Swan Philatelic Imports.

I also know where floortrader is coming from. I used to go to live auctions for box lots and the problem is that there will be always be a couple ebay sellers there that will drive up anything with stamps to a certain level. Thus the chances of getting a real bargain can go down. However, if you really know your stamps and have the time to go through the lots you can ace out the standard ebay bulk seller. The re-sellers also tend to avoid anything without stamps (supplies) so there are bargains to be had there at times.