Advice Needed On Labeling FDC Collection By Scott #

After going thru a bunch last night, I have a much better idea of what it's going to take time-wise. Thanks so much for all the feedback, opinions, pointers, etc. I did have one other thing occur to me that I wanted to ask about... since this is the forum that deals with covers, does anyone have experience with selling to a dealer, specifically one that deals in FDCs? John Becker was talking about the value of time and I was wondering if it was worth considering going to the other extreme of what I had been thinking and just selling the entire lot to someone who specializes in them.

Yes, selling to a dealer is a choice though one needs to understand a few things.

The first one is whether all of the covers are in perfect condition front and back. You have not mentioned yet whether there is any glue or construction paper remnants or staining etc. from how they were mounted. Any damage of any kind will make them undesirable to a dealer since they must turn around and sell them to collectors who demand perfection in FDCs unless they are of great rarity and from your description so far there seems to be none with any rarity.

The second thing to understand is that dealers can and do buy crate loads of countless FDCs of the kind you have at wholesale prices which they must do to stay in business as they have operating costs that they have to pay for. Such operating costs include living wage salaries and benefits for themselves and any employees, the cost of regular advertising, the cost of their store or warehouse or whatever they are using including paying for utilities and taxes, the cost for them to travel to and from stamp shows and pay for their booth rental and pay for their hotel and meals to sell their material, the cost of any vehicles they use in their business including gas, the cost of buying the vehicle, maintaining it, and replacing it regularly, the cost to tie up their money in the covers until they sell, the cost of insurance to protect against things like fire or floods destroying their stock, the need to make a reasonable profit to plow back into their company to make it grow, the cost to pay off any business loans or investors they have, etc. etc. As such they typically are able to offer only pennies per dollar on what they might be able to sell it for. The result is that most dealers are not interested in buying such common material as it costs them more to handle it over the months and years that it will take them to prepare and sell it than what they can get out of it. If you were offering them FDCs from the 1800s and early 1900s or early first flight covers or covers from the civil war or covers from the 1800s to or from exotic locations or such I am sure they would be more eager to buy, but your material is very common and can be hard to sell at most any price. Go ahead and contact one or two dealers and see if they might be interested and you may get lucky, but keep understand their very real economics and keep your expectations in accord with what I have tried to explain. Or another way to appreciate why dealers must pay such low prices for covers or stamps would be to take 20 minutes and a piece of paper and write out everything it would cost you to set up and operate your own stamp business and figure out how much you would need to earn in profits each month just to pay the bills and then spread that amount over the number of FDCs you would have to sell at $1 to $2 each and every month remembering that stamp sales are somewhat seasonal with many collectors doing less with their collections during the spring and summer months when it is nice to be outside in the fresh air rather than being cooped up at home in their den like they during colder weather months.