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Ok I am an outlier here but honestly I kinda like stuff like that. I’m not gonna pretend it’s worth a million dollars (like they would be cool with you selling it anyway) but real China is actually really pretty and sturdy if you take care of it and has a lot of neat little pieces of history and stories related to it. I like antiques and the look of old stuff.
However
My mom once tried to give us old pilsner glasses, and the story was “Grandpa bought them and didn’t like them so they’ve been in this cupboard since then”, and then got really disappointed when I was seeing if a friend of mine wanted one since he’s a real beer guy who might like fancy glasses.
So yeah if you already have plates, and your family history isn’t as great or interesting to you, don’t feel obligated to keep stuff you don’t like. Donate it (to anything other than goodwill or salvation army) or whatever.
Thing is everybody’s gramma has a cabinet full of china because it’s mass produced. Just like diamond engagement rings or high school proms people in the mid-20th century made up a tradition of gifting sets of china to young women because of all the fancy dinners every single middle class woman would be hosting throughout her life.
What happened is a bunch of fancy looking plates sat in cupboards in dining rooms for decades while actual meals were eaten off other also mass-produced but slightly cheaper plates that were stored in the kitchen cabinets.
Is it some universal thing? I thought it was USSR-specific thing.
Gramma’s holier than god department store retail china is an actual problem in the United States. Some of it is fucking radioactive.
Grammy needs to lay off the synthol
My mom has 3 different china cabinets and more glasses than the royal family. We only use the ones in the kitchen and maybe 4 in the new years.
The other day she said ahe would sell one of the sets, a very old time like tea set, but see that set was the last gift my granpa gave my grandma before he died and they are both gone…and my mom is getting older… and I had a anxiety attack thinking that she would get rid of that and started crying.
I think stuff Is just stuff, but idk man, it did hurt. Boy I’ll have a bad time the day i have to get rid of those fucking glasses.
Definitely use them. Every time you do, you’ll think of them, and it will bring you joy.
Step 1: Take pictures so that you can look back when you want to. The items are gone, but the memories are not. Step 2: Give them to someone who will appreciate them. Tell them the story so they can truly know what they meant to your family.
Just use them
I’ll probably do this. China and glasses break, speacilly when is used. At least I wpuld feel like the stuff served it’s purpuse and tbf in my house plates, glasses and cups break like once a week hhHahHhh
My friend has a set of napkins that is so important that they have never been used. Drives me bonkers.
Am I your friend?
So, weird similarities…I have a bag of napkins, like, the paper ones that you but from the store. I guess my dad bought them years ago and they just sat in his room, never used. After he passed, I figured, hey - free napkins.
I can’t bring myself to use them because they smell like his room.
This sounds like a completely reasonable reason to skip using napkins. I love nostalgia and scent and have a few people I wish I could smell again.
No, my friend can’t use their napkins because they’re too high quality to be used. Such high quality that they’re never used. But never-used napkins that don’t smell like your late father’s room are not high quality at all. I think they’re effectively worthless.
I bought a set of 4 matched plates off eBay. It may be shallow consolation but some of those plates and what-not go to loving homes. My plates are classy AF and I love them
I wonder to this day what happened to mom’s Lladro figurines and the Royal Dalton tea cups. I’m sure my sister got Nana’s sterling and Mom’s plate. It’s really sad that the Danish modern furniture had to go before she moved up here but she was happy with IKEA and CostPlus replacements.
I got her pots, which was all that mattered to me. There’s something symmetrical in making Boeff Bourguignon in the same pot you learned to make beef stew at age 14.
Boeuf
Your mom sounds awesome
What, the curtains?
She’s got huuuge tracts o China
no one under 50 gives a rat’s ass about great grandma’s “look at me i’m victorian high society” china cabinet. when i managed an antique store we had more old people coming in trying to sell their shit than we had anyone coming in to buy. went out of business because antiques are dead for the next who knows how many generations
Complete nonsense.
Not to sound too harsh but this is just so silly, blanket assuming that everybody on the planet under the age of 50 are not interested in something that’s been pretty commonly popular, just because your individual experience of running a shop in one town in one country happens to suggest that cool stuff like this isn’t popular.
How do you know your town’s demographics were a completely average in every way representation of you own nation’s demographics (nevermind the world) - not skewed by age ranges, gender, wealth, occupational discrepancies, etc?
How do you know your failed business is due to your product being unpopular, Vs your business being poorly advertised to its target demographic (who you think doesn’t exist…), or maybe overpriced compared to the available expendable income of the local population, or in a location that wasn’t ideal for target demos to travel to, or they didn’t like the vibe of the place, etc etc.
There’s so many possibilities that it’s ridiculous to make such a sweeping blanket statement about everyone’s tastes based on your extremely subjective and limited experience.
For example, myself and many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances would kill for that collection, it’s rad, and we’re decades away from 50 haha, many of us are in our 20s! We’re slowly building our own collections up as we go through life and loving it :-)
I myself just recently got a lovely porcelain teapot that now sits on the mantle next to my other Victorian porcelain, glassware, etc, and I love my display and storage cabinetry, I plan to build my own eventually using traditional joinery <3 I’m on the lookout for more tea china still too, not enough for High Tea with more guests yet, and that simply won’t do! :-D
I know I come across a bit harsh here and I’m sure you’re lovely, just consider not making blanket assumptions about the interests and tastes of the 5,500,000,000~ people who are under the age of 50, you know? :-)
ok. you and your friends give a rat’s ass about it.
no one else does.
https://blogs.deloitte.co.uk/mondaybriefing/2021/08/whatever-happened-to-the-antiques-market.html
https://www.joshuakennon.com/antique-furniture-prices-have-collapsed/
https://www.antiquers.com/threads/what-has-happened-to-the-pottery-market.5906/
https://www.antiquesage.com/collectibles-market-dying/
the only old stuff that’s actually worth a high price is quality furniture: storage chests, tables, cabinets, shelves, etc-- made from old growth wood and built like a tank. that stuff will last generations and will probably still be cheaper than a modern piece of comparable quality (aka custom made by an artisan)
My job is to declutter homes and we would most likely throw everything away you can see on this picture. Old peoples homes are often filled with these things and no one will buy it if we try to sell it at our second hand store for a cheap price.
It certainly depends on the item but I agree that no one cares about the junk grammy bought twenty years ago from Sears that was meant to look like the real stuff. At the same time, though, I’ve been on a real Meissen binge for the past few months. Good china definitely has some value and is beautiful to look at and display
It’s an interesting market. Some individual pieces on Missing Pieces go for more than an almost complete set would to someone walking into a thrift shop.
everyone’s got something they’ll spend extra money on just for its looks. increasingly though, people are realizing that the $150 plates aren’t doing any better of a job holding their dinner than the $20 walmart plates
not only that, but the idea that you need a different plate for bread, a plate for entree, a plate for salad, a plate for pasta–it’s asinine. gotta be one of the bigger scams of the industrial age. same thing with utensils: you’ve got your dinner fork, dessert fork, fish fork, salad fork, fruit fork, and on and on. um excuse me, fuck all that noise, give me 1 plate and 1 fork, and call me an uncultured philistine if it makes everyone feel better, but i’m not buying all that crap
It is weird to think that there is (or was) and industry entirely based around trying to sell things that aren’t in style or simply not as functional compared to modern stuff.
C’mon man, you know how big retro stuff is
There are people unironically out there listening to tapes on warbly old walkmans just for the aesthetic of a nostalgia they’ll never have
Emulating tape hiss via plugins…
Emulating tape hiss via plugins…
Imagine trying to explain this sentence to a medieval peasant
I think explaining how we’ve had this exchange would be enough.
Just look at the amount of people wearing watches with an automatic movement instead of a quarz movement
That’s not all nostalgia, those are just cool and legit interesting
Never made sense to me to keep cutlery and plates and stuff that never gets used to show “yes this is the place where eating happens.”
“and according to my new wall art, this is the room where we live, laugh, and/or love. Namaste”
back in the day bored housewives used to love to throw dinner parties just to show off their fancy serveware, pretending that they’re downton abbey or something. i’ve experienced it, since it’s the same shit at every holiday get together. it’s almost surreal, sitting in the midst of a perpetual conversation about dinner plates, very similar to dudes at a superbowl party, except the plates are the superbowls
too expensive, ikea is $20
Idk I found some royal doultan that I really like but it’s simple not flowery
I read Second Hand by Adam Minter. Apparently it’s all the rage in some developing nations. To the point where the antique store owners he interviews in the Midwest have a direct line to some dude in Africa.
After my mom died, my dad sold her China to her friend for a nickel. Which is great, because I would have just taken it to the VV Boutique and donated it.
I kind of miss some of the things my mom had around the house my whole life, but also I’d I kept it all, there wouldn’t be room for my stuff. And I’m not putting Trypticon in a box so I can display some Franklin Mint goose plate.
One or two pieces, sure. A whole fucking cabinet? No thanks.
Buy it and use it. It’s fun kitch, don’t let it collect dust. If it breaks, no worries, lots of it around.
Tastes change. As Millennials get older, have kids, buy large houses, they’ll want to fill them. All it’ll take is a couple of social media influences to bring back such kitch. I can’t believe that redneck beards have been in vogue for so long, but they came back from the slimy grave of the 70s.
When my mother dies and I have to deal with all her crystal, I’ll get roaring drunk and spend the night smashing those useless fucking things in the fire, cackling like a madman. I fucking hated looking at all that money spent on utterly worthless sparkly shit.
Mum pushing us her useless and now worthless silver crap. Nah thanks, I’m not slaving over polishing stupid fancy forks.
Any silver I get I’m feeding to the furnace and casting into bars.
Sadly most of this boomer junk is just coated and doesn’t have much silver in it otherwise yep, chuck it into Mount Doom for some cash.
Mum is already doing it with the jewelry so at least that’s not just sitting there gathering dust.
There are websites that buy this stuff, this is just one example, and there are others. You can get a bit of cash without a ton of effort, just pack it up nicely and send it in.
Spoiler alert: they’re probably not buying mass produced China sets even if they are nice.
Source: me exhausting all avenues of trying to part with vintage China set(s) and replacements.com telling me to politely fuck off.
and never use
Just like my degree
Oh gawd, don’t remind me. My mom already tried selling it and couldn’t find anyone to buy it. Of course, she blames kids these days for not valuing her obviously valuable collection…
you can’t reason with them. no matter how much you try to tell my mom it’s not the 90s anymore, she absolutely refuses to accept any reality other than her 10 giant plastic bins stuffed with beanie babies is a priceless collection
My grandma got into snowbabies lol
Well, if the market so undervalues that stuff, the logical step would be to go buy other people’s beanie babies for cheap, before people realize how much they are actually worth. And then sell heaps of them for profit, once people come to their senses.
That’s obviously a very stupid idea, that you could pose to her, and let her argue why she doesn’t do that. Maybe it triggers a realization about how value is constructed.
But maybe it’s not worth the risk of her taking up on this very stupid idea.
What’s the problem? Just do with those what you did to the dishes when the babysitter died.
Right on top of that, Rose!
Actually, i wish i had something from my grandparents. I found my grandfathers dvds in a second hand store.
