Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/15/one-mans-million-dollar-hot.html
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I wrote about the most valuable toy cars a few years back for Mental Floss, including the Beach Bomb, if you’d like to know more about it (and check your grandparents’ attic to see if they have any of these lying around): http://mentalfloss.com/article/24852/tiny-cars-big-prices-5-really-expensive-toy-cars
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“Well, son, you could play with them now, or you could tuck them safely away and have them possibly be worth a lot of money someday.”
“Mom! Dad’s talking crazy again!”
“Jerry, stop telling our son to not enjoy childhood!”
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I just sent this to a friend who is a trufan of Hot Wheels. She’s gonna be disappointed in this guy’s: this is a boy’s toy angle, but I pointed to the lovely rack focus shots of the cars as being worth her time.
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I still won’t let the kids touch their beanie babies… those things’ll be worth a fortune someday!
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The collection would be worth double if he didn’t take the cars out of the package!
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Is the singular form really ‘a Hot Wheel’?
That’s bad as calling records vinyls 
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You haven’t truly experienced records until you’ve heard them on vinyl.
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I recognize some of those.
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One Hot Wheels pink VW Beach Bomb Rear-Loader is worth $100,000. That clearly sets a lower limit on the costs of time-travel, or on how many you can carry. I am sure we can profile the economics behind time-travel with a careful study of auction prices…
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Yeah, but if you introduced say 10 more pink buses, the price would not longer be $100K each, as you just dramatically increased the supply.
Rare coins, that are expensive but not so rare that introducing 10 or 20 new copies wouldn’t affect the values too much, are probably the best cost per lb ratio.
Unless one can go back and get a dinosaur egg. Those would be worth a lot.
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Exactly so. If you had a time machine, then there is probably a best number to bring back. If you sold them one at a time, then each additional sale would not impact the previous sales, provided you managed to hide the fact that you had a whole box of these things. At some point, the price would drop sufficiently that you would fill your pockets with original Star Wars figures, or something else. So, if you had your time machine and were wanting to shop for Hot Wheels, you might buy two or three, but not just one, because if the time machine can take you, it will probably take an extra Hot Wheels without adding to the cost.
Dinosaur eggs would be worth more, especially if they were fresh, but you would have to go that might further back in time. This would suggest there was an extra cost related to how far back you go; or perhaps it is necessary to hide the fact you have a time machine, and fresh dinosaur eggs would be a bit of a giveaway unless you claimed to know of an island where they still lived, or something.
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All that hassle for money? With a time machine?
Go yesterday with today’s winning lottery numbers. Boom.
Or, if you want to be fancy about it, I’ll bet a couple of ducats invested in a certain banca will be worth a nice amount after 500 years of compound interest.
Whatever you do, don’t try to sell baby Hitler. We know it’s tempting, but it’s a rookie mistake. Just don’t.
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I wouldn’t be able to do anything with a time machine. every time trying to use it future me would come, tap me on the shoulder and say “don’t do it. it’s stupid. again.”
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Except, it seems bringing back lottery numbers doesn’t work, or they would all be at it. Maybe the time-space continuum is able to alter a small fact such as the actual winning numbers of a lottery on a day, but is unable to fix a larger thing such as the manufacture of a particular line of Hot Wheels cars safer the event.
Man, you can read the ads in “What Time Machine?” magazine, but they never tell you about this sort of thing. Someone should go back into the past and make sure something was done about it.
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How can you know every lottery winner isn’t a time traveller? The odds are certainly against such a thing ever happening without shenanigans.
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That’s why really old folks always win… The time traveler tells them when they are going to die and gives then a big chunk cash to play the numbers for them.
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