eMoviePoster.com

How can that be? Did you ever hear of the concept of "negative value"? This is when the cost of restoring or recovering something is greater than its current market value. An example might be a sunken ship that is on the bottom of the ocean. Say the cost of raising it up is $10 million, but the value of the ship and contents is only $5 million, than that ship has a "negative value" of "minus $5 million"! Better to leave it where it is, and lose nothing (but there IS the real chance that at a later day it will be worth much more, or the recovery cost will become much lower, and then it might be worth salvaging.

How does this relate to movie paper? Say you find a bunch of old posters under a floor in terrible incomplete condition. The cost  to restore them might well be far more than their value after they are restored, so there is "negative value" if you were to buy them. Now of course, these may well be the only known examples of those posters, and then one might choose to buy them and restore them, but this still would not be a sound financial move.

Or suppose you find a theater owner that has saved up 5,000 posters from the past 20 years. If they were all theater-used, and they tape, tears, pinholes and stains, they may be worth so little that it is not worth the trouble to try to sell them, either singly or as a group, because of the massive effort involved in doing so. So you can't buy them, even if the price is very low.

But suppose those 5,000 posters are in great condition. But also suppose there are few or no "better titles" (maybe a dealer bought those before you were offered them). Then they STILL might have "negative value"! Why? Because the work involved in photographing, describing and listing there can be a massive effort, requiring hundreds of hours of labor. After all is said and done, then you might end up with well under minimum wage for your effort. Better to have never seen them and have simply worked those extra hours at your job!

Of it might be 500 examples of one item that only sells for a few dollars (say $5), and one that next-to-no collectors are looking for or are interested in buying. You might sell a handful of these for $5 each, and then you might never sell another. If someone offered these to you for nothing, but you would still have to pay shipping of $100, then these two would have "negative value".

These are just a few of the many, many examples of items that are better off discarded than bought, even if it for a very low price. And here is one more GREAT example of "negative value". Suppose you just have five or ten movie paper items that have VERY low collectible value, and you decide to consign them to us at eMoviePoster.com. If they cost $25 to mail, and after auctioning your share is under $25, then you would have far better off simply discarding them.

I know full well it "goes against the grain" to EVER "throw movie paper items away". But sometimes it really makes sense to do. Just be certain that before you ever take this drastic step, you check with us to make sure they don't have some "hidden" value!