If you have collected for awhile, there is a good chance this has happened to you. It has happened a few times to me, and it is always exciting.
It is the back-in-time find. The out of leftfield experience when you happen upon some gems from the past. Just hanging there, daring you to purchase them at the standard store price.
I am not talking about the convention find, or the swap meet find. It is the in-store find.
There are a couple of ways this can happen. One, someone returned a bunch of stuff to your local big box store, and you benefit. The other, you walk in to a random store you haven’t visited before, and the stock seems to be stuck in time. You have no idea how long the models have been there, but you don’t care. There is some awesome stuff.
That happened to me yesterday. I do a fair amount of wandering through rural areas for my job, and while waiting for a meeting to start in one of those rural towns, I wandered into a nearby store. Little did I know I would also be going 7 to 10 years back in time.
A plethora of 2006 and 2009 Hot Wheels models, with cards as crisp as brand new. Old stock? Returns? I have no idea. Don’t really care. Each of these were $1.25, and I bought a few:
The white ’69 Vette was a Kmart exclusive, so would indicate these came from someone. But I wasn’t going to ask. I just bought the models above. And I left a lot too.
It made for a fun day. It reminded me of another cool day at Target:
There have been others too. It happens when you least expect it. Just enjoy it when it does.
The best/funniest ones are cars that show up at a store and they are older than the store itself, haha
awesome! in my place, this probably will never happen. been a collector for a while now. such excitement in collecting and hunting on some places. great find though!
Darn….some people have all the luck. Here I am spending $10 plus on eBay for older cars I missed out on and I can't even find new $1 releases because store distributions are problematic.
Sick
just wow!
It puzzles me that people will pay 1.25 at some store, but won't pay 50 cents at a convention for the same car.
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I would love picking the Chevelle, Carrera GT, Racing Corvette and Dodge Daytona among these photos. Earlier in 2013, I found some 2010 and 2011 models, but not many, at least not the interesting ones. Few times I found an earlier released model or the year later, one of these times was in the middle or last year, that a '71 Mustang Funny Car, in blue, which I wanted very much, appeared from “nowhere”, on the pegs of a store that I'm used to check “carefully”, making the pair with the green one that I ended grabbing for liking the casting.
Jackpot!!!
Woooooow. This happens to me every once in a while, but it's only ever like 3, 4, maybe 5 cars at a time…
I would LITERALLY have bought pretty much every car visible in these pics. The Matchbox pic almost made my heart stop. I do have the blue RS6 Avant, but with split 10-spokes. John, do you know which is more common? I much prefer the 5-spoke you have pictured.
Think I answered my own question…the RS6 I guess was released in blue a couple times, the 5-spoke version with a tan interior, the split 10-spoke with black interior.
I saw the same thing at a roses 2006 and 2009 Hot Wheels was not a ton but was all the peg space they had
I remember when T HUNTs has green stripes
And seeing one was OMG
Now they're just overrated
If anybody's in Victoria BC, all the Great Canadian Dollar Stores around the city have pegs and pegs of stock from roughly 2002-2005.
Those were the days when you would find a whole lot of licensed castings when you walk up to the Hot Wheels aisle. Now it's a real big challenge for collectors (who only collect licensed castings) to go through all the junk just to find one little Porsche or an Acura out of hundreds of generic thingies. Matchbox is even more pathetic as you just can't find them at any store.
So… these pics are great memories and thanks for sharing.
It's happened to me twice, once in K Mart where the whole store was behind a year or two. And once in Toys R Us when I found a Nissan Silvia S15 in Yellow easily three or four years old that someone probably returned (why I don't know). It was in great condition.
Why do you collect?
You are getting ripped off son $10 plus but one born every minute
What a breath of fresh air. These pictures brings back memories but it happens very rarely now even in Malaysia. Which kinda puts a damper on collecting.
Thank you for sharing.
Back when that Volvo 1800 came out I stopped at the Matchbox pegs before the HW's.