Treasure Chest Of Stamps From Champion Stamp Co.?

Hi all,

I'm wondering if anyone has any experience buying stamp lots from Champion Stamp Co. in New York? They sell custom "treasure chest" lots of stamps, for example min. cat. value $500 for $99.95 or min. cat. value $1000 for $190, etc.

Just wondering if any have any experience with these?

Thanks!

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Yes, back in the 1990's. It wasn't worth it in my opinion. You can do better at a show or auction where you can at least see all or part of the material up front.

I would not buy anything blind like that. I like to see what I am getting and know I need it rather than something that I cannot use.

No thanks, I will pick my own stamps.

Agree with the others ,doesn't sound like a good deal . Shop around and see what your getting first .

The $500 or $1,000 CV would be a worry for me. I have a bulging stock-book of US stamps on my kitchen table at present, in preparation for sale on ebay. Nominal CV is doubtless considerable, but, in reality, it's crammed with penny stamps - which is what most stamps are.

I've been in their store. They have a HUGE stock of very overpriced sets and singles stored in hundreds of stock books. So they aren't lazy about working up stock into small units. If Champion comes across anything of real value, it would go into the counter books, not the Treasure Chests.

I used to go in their store when I visited a friend in New York who was postal history dealer. Their stock has been cherry picked many times over and it's doubtful that there's any treasure in those treasure boxes. I'd rather spend the money on buying better sets instead of gambling on finding anything good in a box of typical mixture material.

It depends upon what you are looking for in such a lot. If you are looking for a lot of stamps to fly speck or for odd cancels, it might be something to consider. Personally, I would not be interested in such a lot, as I'm at the point where the likelihood I would find anything useful to me is pretty slim.

If you just like the thrill of the hunt, I'd recommend bidding on collections/accumulations at auction rather than going this route.

Chris,

I bought from them once and was awfully disappointed.

Jack Kelley

WAIT A MINUTE ----CHAMPION STAMPS of New York City with A&D STAMPS of California both have the biggest stamp inventory available to the retail customer in the U.S. .It is not difficult to understand their business model to maintain such a large impressive inventory .
They have to buy many larger collection to build their inventory. This results in lots of duplicates of the more common stamps and lots of stuff that doesn't fit their inventory like broken sets ,sets that are mixed mint and used ,heavy hinged material, stamps that are over cataloged and stamps that have faults .All this type of material accumulates fast when your buying stamp inventory .

So what are you getting for the 1/5 catalog ? Your getting all the stuff that doesn't fit their huge inventory, like the broken sets and common material and other stuff mentioned above .This material is great for someone filling album pages or filling stock books with high price stamps .

So it depends on the collector and what his interest.

Thanks to everyone for their comments!




Perhaps I will start going this route rather than buying blindly.