Why Has the Machine Forsaken Us

 

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We “borrowed” this Komatsu fork lift from a tiny Costco

If you call the Ebay customer service folks—nice people!—and ask them if they have some ideas about why your listings have suddenly become completely invisible in some extremely important types of searches (a situation that seems to be the culprit in the tiny car lot’s sales dwindling by about 80% in recent months compared to the glory days of the previous summer) the first thing they’ll do is roll their eyeballs, almost violently. You can hear it over the phone. They get this kind of thing all the time. Yeah right! Not bloody likely! they want to say. But of course they can’t say anything like that. They have to go and do a search and find your listings to prove you wrong, and then break the news to you in a gentle and gracious fashion. After several minutes of searching, however, you’ll hear a bemused “Huh!” They can’t find the listings where they are supposed to be, and they don’t know why. Now this is strange! they say. Unfortunately, the Ebay algorithm turns out to be about as much of a mystery to the help crew as it is to the customers. Their suggestions are well-meant, but useless. They don’t know. Perhaps there is not one single human being in the world who knows exactly why the Machine has shunned the tiny car lot. But if you are that human being, please, drop us a line. In the meantime, if you collect or otherwise enjoy the tiny cars, take a minute and scroll through the goods on Ebay. Lots of Tomica going on (aka Pocket Cars), Matchbox, Corgi for the discerning collector and everybody else too.

Excitement on the Lot

We’ve been so busy over here with the tiny vehicles we haven’t been able to keep up with our highly informative postings. We’ve had several huge (to us) shipments come in and we’ve been shipping them out at a good pace. Mert has been working dawn til dusk with no breaks as stipulated in our verbal contract. We’re stocked with Matchbox regular wheels from the 60s as usual, but also Superfast from the 1970s. Currently having a huge super-sale on Matchbox Superfast on ebay.  GO THERE.

Here’s a small sampling of what we’ve been buying and selling over the past few weeks. Expert collectors will notice right away a few interesting items among those below:

We also made room on the lot for a bunch of high quality vintage Japanese mini-cars by Tomica. These date from the early 1970s to early 1980s and include almost all near mint or mint-condition stuff. Included are some with the highly sought after “early wheels” from the early 70s. The cars have names like Sunny Excellent 1400GX and Cherry F-II and almost all have opening doors. The market for these Tomica mini cars is different. Most of the energy is in Asia where millions of kids grew up with these. (Tomicas were marketed in the US as “Pocket Cars,” and they did fairly well but ultimately couldn’t hang with Hot Wheels and the rest, being more expensive and initially featuring many obscure Japan-only cars.) It’s also a more hoppin’ market than the vintage Matchbox market these days. It’s not hard to find reasons why when you hold TOMY Tomica mini-cars in your hand.

And that’s not all. We received a 60-pound box from Ed, a former hobby shop owner and diecast collector back east who has accumulated a large amount of Corgi Classics, Models of Yesteryear, big Solido models and the like over the decades. New Old Stock, as they say. I’m having a great time going through it, trying to learn as much as I can on the way as this has not been my forte, and we’ll put em up for sale as soon as we can. The market for these things is not exactly hot but we’ll see what we can do for him. No more room in Ed’s basement. EVERYTHING MUST GO.

Check out our current inventory on the bay.

Tomica Daily News Truck

“What’s that truck for? I don’t get it.” Mert was confused. He was an old fella and had seen plenty of newspaper trucks in his day, but I guess it had been so long he had forgotten what they were for. “Do they put the I-Pads in there?”

“No, that’s a tiny newspaper truck, Mert. Newspapers in there.”

He sounded it out. “Newssspapers.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t get it. Is it like a mobile wifi hotspot?”

“Well, no.”

This vintage Tomica Daily News Truck, a Nissan Caball (No. 107-1 in the series), is in just about factory mint condition, with the slightest storage wear visible, but only to those who are extremely careful in their examination of tiny vintage vehicles. Made in Japan. A rare model in extremely rare very very near mint condition.

Comes with a load of tiny newspapers. Just kidding, no tiny newspapers.

TOMICA NO. 87, 88 NISSAN CABALL DAILY NEWS TRUCK VERY NEAR MINT • EBAY SOLD, I’M GOING TO MISS THIS ONE