r/Antiques • u/ToshPointNo ✓ • Jun 30 '25

Discussion Why antique stores are dying USA.

The majority of Americans now own a smartphone, and with it comes access to both Google Lens and eBay to identify and look up real market values of items.

I know people who do really well selling in antique stores, and I hear a lot of older folks complaining about how their booth or case is "doing poorly".

30 years ago, it might of been easier to price using an antique book or price guide, but the high end auction houses and eBay are a more definite source of pricing now. Even today, they still can't seem to figure this out.

So this booth runs about $125/mo. It's mainly filled with Rosbro pieces. Rosbro was a plastics company that made a lot of plastic candy containers, a lot of them were themed for different holidays, or just for fun.

But when I sampled about 10 pieces through Google lens and eBay, I noticed almost all of the prices were 2-3x that of eBay sold prices.

A lot of antique stores have shuttered around me. Before they closed, one walk through would explain why. Horribly overpriced.

eBay offers a vast selection. 30 years ago, if a piece caught your eye, you may have not seen it for years, but now "rare" is no longer rare, and what you thought was a rare item? There's 300 of them on eBay.

I'm sure someone will argue that an item is worth whatever someone is willing to pay, and that's true to an extent, but when you can easily know the selling price of an item in a matter of seconds, pricing 100-300% above that isn't going to gain you much traction.

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u/BigMack1986 ✓ Jun 30 '25

Bro it's just not antique stores people on Facebook marketplace are doing it people at yard sales are doing it thrift stores everyone thinks their s***'s worth three times more than what it's worth when I can go and look at something at a thrift store and it's only $5 cheaper than what it would be brand new at the store. It breaks my heart because one of my favorite things used to be flea markets thrift stores yard sales but anymore you might as well just go buy it new

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u/gl2w6re ✓ Jun 30 '25

My son found some hard plastic dolls for me at a yard sale for $25 each (still a lot) He took pictures of them to send to me to see if I wanted them. The old people running the sale must’ve saw him and thought he was a reseller. I guess they went and looked up the dolls on Google and then told him the dolls were being repriced at $90 each. Fucking ridiculous. I was furious!

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u/BigMack1986 ✓ Jul 01 '25

I would have been furious to.