I love sets from the 80's.  I'm not alone, as many AFOL's consider the 1980's the middle of LEGO's "Golden Age."  Specifically I have a penchant for construction sets.  (Yes, yes—I realize that all LEGO sets are "construction" sets.  I mean the Town sets where there's some kind of heavy machinery, and the minifigs are construction workers.)

Just like any other set collector, I love to find sets that are still sealed in their box.  As you can imagine, sealed sets from the 80's fetch a premium price on ebay.  A couple of weeks ago I was browsing ebay and came across a sealed 6686 Backhoe set.  I knew that this set would go for at least $20.  It could very likely go up to $50, and if the right people happened to be searching ebay during the auction, then it might get into the $70 to $80 range.

I put the set on my watchlist so that I could see what the final price was.  After 18 bids that 7-day auction ended at $152.50!  I've been watching LEGO sets sell on ebay for enough years to know that a small set going for over $100 doesn't happen very often.  If the set had some exclusive minifig or part, that might explain it, but the 6686 Backhoe doesn't have any rare items.  Being sealed in the original box after 24 years definitely pushes up the price on a LEGO set, but $152.50 is just crazy.  Even if I won the lottery and had money to burn, I wouldn't pay that much for such a small set.

In the last couple of years, I've seen ebay auctions that made me think that all the rich people have bought what they want.  What I mean by that is that rich people who have enough money to buy whatever they want have completed their "vintage LEGO I want to buy" checklists, and therefore they're not out there making high dollar bids nearly as much as they used to.  The people out searching on ebay for vintage LEGO today are the ones who are still trying to complete their own LEGO collecting checklists because they've been outbid so many times over the years by those who had scads of cash.  The reason I thought this is that I'd seen several vintage LEGO auctions go for a lot less that what they would have gone for just a few years ago.

...and then I see something like this recent auction, and I realize that I have to rethink my whole ebay/LEGO/online-economics theory.