A singing fish on a plaque cost about $30 some 30 years ago. Years later, an artist’s reprogrammed version sold for $10,000. The Journal’s Misty White Sidell priced the whole automata economy in a small box on page D3. It runs from a late-1990s Furby at about $30 to $75,000 for five singing milk cartons at a grocery store. We read it twice. The joy is real. The returns are a different story.
Start at the top. Stew Leonard’s, the family grocer, has some 200 animatronic displays across its eight stores in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. Dancing avocados. Milk crates. The costliest was a quintet of singing milk cartons at $75,000. Two full-time staffers build and maintain them. Stew Leonard Jr., 72, calls them “smile machines.” Nobody has ever asked to buy one. The store spends that money to make shoppers happy, and that’s the whole return.
Now the handmade end. Bliss Kolb, 70, builds wooden animals in Seattle that move on pulleys and gears. He’d made about 25 of them in some 15 years of near anonymity. Then singer Kelly Clarkson posted about a Brooklyn store that wouldn’t sell her one of his birds. He’s had 100 or so commission requests since. His pieces mostly run $4,000 to $15,000 and take nearly a year each. The materials cost a couple hundred dollars. The price is his year, and he isn’t taking new orders right now.
The $30 fish that sold for $10,000
Here’s the part collectors should read slowly. Big Mouth Billy Bass cost about $30 when it came out some 30 years ago. Artist Dena Yago, 38, reprogrammed five of them for a 2020 gallery show, where they seemed to hold a conversation. She has sold three at $10,000 each. The fish didn’t do that. The artist did. The Furby, about $30 in the late 1990s, now sits in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and it was recently reissued as a toy. The FurReal parrot is the odd one out. It sold for about $50 new and now fetches more than $300 used. That’s the rare toy that went up on its own.
Our read
This is Investments and Risk (IN04), and it’s about the box in the attic. A collectible isn’t something a plan can lean on. It has no yield, no price you can check each morning, and a value that depends on finding the one buyer who wants it. The Journal’s ladder makes the point without a lecture. The $30 Furby became a museum piece and still sells as a toy. The $30 fish reached $10,000 only after a working artist put her name and her idea on it. Stew Leonard’s spends $75,000 on a display and treats it as the cost of a smile. Buy the Furby. Enjoy the fish. Just don’t write either one into the retirement plan.
The one thing in your plan this touches is the line for things you own that aren’t cash or securities. Art, watches, cars, the collection. This week, check what you’ve written down as its value, and ask where that number came from. A real sale of a similar piece counts. A hope doesn’t. If that number is doing real work in your retirement math, bring it to the next review. It’s easier to check the roof while the sun’s out.