In the last few years i have been doing more bartering than ever before...
so these days my brain doesn't immediately jump to giving an item a monetary value.
As we unclutterers know just because something was a 'deal' doesn't mean we came out ahead if we have to give it house room and never use it.
Last year I picked up a vintage Stanley brand insulated flask..
http://erasergirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/stanley.jpg
i have a fondness for old technology..old working technology..things i can use that aren't just decorative...hey..i'm trying.
I saw this in an antique store and my alarm bells went off, it was old..and it was completely underpriced at $10. So I brought it home and researched it, made about 1930 and is sized to fit in a man's overcoat pocket of the day. A good insulated qt container for your coffee or tea. I replaced the cork gasket so it didn't leak, took some images and uploaded them to flickr, then put it on a shelf in the kitchen.
http://erasergirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/stanley2.jpg
I got an email yesterday from the Stanley Corp who were interested in buying my pictures...so i asked them 'why not buy the flask itself?' and they were floored, they didn't realize i had the flask and would be interested in parting with it. Why not? I like it but if i died tomorrow it would end up at a thrift store with the rest of my things. It is better that it goes back home anyway.
I couldn't honestly come up with a monetary Price for the item. I said Price not Value...legitimately it has very little appeal as an antique, IF you found a collector it would be $40-$50 bucks in my opinion. in perfect condition, which is it so very not, it couldn't be more than 75-100.
They offered to send me many times that in product if I wanted, in their words 'an obscene' amount of product. However Stanley and Aladdin only sells products that transport food, lovely products, but i'm 50 now..how much can i consume before i die?
So my solution...my intention is to test their definition of "Obscene". I sent an email to about 12 friends asking them to pick out a couple of things off the company website for themselves and their significant others.
I will be trading the $10 purchased flask for many hundreds of dollars of products for all my friends. In my opinion that is a much better and smarter deal than exchanging the flask for a small amount of money or a bunch of crap i don't need.
My moral of this story is that value, price and cost are three different words for a reason. Just because i could get a whole lot of new toys for myself doesn't mean it was the smart thing to do.
sorry for the long story...i'm being rather smug.
