
The Pez Outlaw - CrocodileStreet
http://www.playboy.com/articles/pez-outlaw
======
chx
This is one shitty piece of work (beyond the laughable war torn Hungary others
mentioned -- I was born Hungarian and back then I still lived there). There's
an interesting start which never actually gets closure: we never learn what
happened at that border crossing.

Also, “I pursued Patek across Austria in a car chase once" followed by "Steve
bribed traffic cops with Pez dispensers stuffed with dollars." One, just how
much money can you squeeze into a Pez dispenser? Two, bribing an _Austrian_
cop? If this article said Hungarian, sure, bribing Hungarian cops was everyday
business (pretty much everyone kept a conveniently large denomination bill in
their driving license which at the time was folded not the credit card format)
but have you ever tried to bribe an Austrian cop? Urgh.

~~~
mmarx
> we never learn what happened at that border crossing.

“So when the Austrian guards stopped Steve and Joshua at the Hungarian border
and threatened to confiscate the toys, the Glews fled east to Budapest,
bringing their Black Santas with them. Back in the U.S. the dispensers sold
for hundreds of dollars each, and Steve vowed to return to Europe, next time
with serious money.”

So they chose not to cross into Austria, but stay in Hungary and go to
Budapest (and, somehow, to the US from there) instead.

------
Tomasoo
"war-torn Eastern Europe" in Hungary in 1994? Looks like a parallel universe
to me.

"the 100-mile-long freeway to Ormož was one of the most dangerous routes in
Europe" In Slovenia in 1993? The war was in Bosnia hundreds of km away.

Thunder of rockets in ZAGREB?

When the easily verifiable stuff is fiction, one can assume a lot of the rest
is also made up.

------
bliss
I surprised myself by figuratively sitting at the edge of my seat reading this
tale. The thing that interests me more though than the tale itself if the
buyers. I'm not a collector. I can understand the shady dealings and the
clandestine meetings to make cash selling these things, but I would love to
read about the mind of the buyer of these things, that I consider junk. If I
came across something in the attic that was judged by someone to be worth
cash, then I'd happily part as long as it contained no sentimental value of
course but I honestly can't understand how value works. I view it as a failing
on my part, I'd honestly love to get into the head of collector types. Maybe
I'm just too habitually frugal.

~~~
pdw
Here's a short (and quite sad) documentary about a family of Beanie Baby
collectors --
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgDsyj5eLmo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgDsyj5eLmo)

~~~
nogayli
People do some crazy things. It's hard to imagine spending $100k on beanie
babies or pez dispensers. In the 80s it was comics. In the 90s it was beanie
babies and pez. I'm not sure what it is now in a few years, after the crash,
we'll be hearing stories.

~~~
judk
It was real estate most recently.

------
JacobAldridge
I delivered a Social Media session at a business conference many years ago
(07? 08? Back when that was something novel), and ran a quiz on Website Logos
with Pez Dispensers as the prize.

I also wanted to make a point about hype and bubbles and evolving business
models over time (what I guess we would now call pivoting). The Pez Dispensers
were a way to discuss unbelievable bubbles, and e-Bay which evolved from a Pez
swap & sell site into the auction juggernaut.

I'm sure some of the people in the room were laughing at inflated values for
Pez and Tulips, while also investing their money into mortgage-backed
securities.

~~~
c3o
(Just an aside: Wikipedia says "the frequently repeated story that eBay was
founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers was fabricated by
a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the media, which were not
interested in the company's previous explanation about wanting to create a
'perfect market')

~~~
JacobAldridge
Well there you go! I hate it when I find myself perpetuating urban legends.
Thank you.

I'll just have to go back to advising audiences that changing their Facebook
profile picture on a regular basis will help cure cancer, prevent child abuse,
catch Kony, and either impeach or re-elect President Obama (I'm never quite
sure which).

------
abruzzi
Most of this, pre-eBay. The article mentions conventions, but I wonder what
the primary avenue for his sales was?

~~~
cge
Conventions, newsletters, mailing lists, lists of potential buyers to contact
personally, collectors contacting him and asking...

Having observed people in a fanatical collecting hobby (vintage pens) through
the insistence of a friend of mine, I get the impression that people involved
in such collecting often strongly dislike eBay and similar sites. eBay, for
all its faults, creates some level of transparency and openness in the market,
and allows everyone to buy, sell, and appraise. For what are essentially
fragile but persistent bubbles, transparency is bad.

Dealers want to be able to tell stories about pieces and their rarity, without
a large market to let buyers verify them, and want to be able to hide sales,
letting them inflate prices as much as possible. They certainly don't want
anyone to be able to compare prices. Buyers want to be able to get special
access to sales of pieces (or what they think is special access), or want to
find people who don't know the value of what they have.

It's interesting hearing people in the hobby talk about these things. Dealers
will rant about eBay and its dangers, or about buyers who "don't want to pay
enough" (meaning they didn't sell that piece at all). Buyers will talk about
how so-and-so contacted them first about a new piece, or about the amazing
rarity of pieces that nevertheless seem to show up pretty often, or about how
values appreciate with time. Unsurprisingly, doing painstaking research on
auction sales over the last several decades, my friend found that values of
most pieces did not even outpace inflation. Somehow, this didn't dissuade him.
The hobby/bubble in its current form, though, is dying, and that's a good
thing.

This is even more the case for collecting bubbles that are based around items
currently being manufactured, as there is always the possibility of just
creating more, and that risk is highest when everyone knows what is going on.
In this case, for example, the manufacturer was easily able to destroy the
dealer's business, but did so because the pieces were being very publicly
sold. Had he instead kept everything quiet, and sold privately, he could have
kept up what was essentially a scam for much longer.

------
operationblackg
Rocket fire they are talking about being 1995 would be the Zagreb rocket
attacks right on the border which seems like exactly the time they are taking
about.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb_rocket_attacks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zagreb_rocket_attacks)

------
yefim
Never thought I'd see the day where a Playboy article is on the top of HN.
Great read.

~~~
vinceguidry
I'm not. Playboy's articles have always been tremendous. When I was younger I
had a t-shirt with a Playboy logo on it and the phrase "I read the articles".

I'm starting to think we need a curation platform for long-form content.
Preferably a subscription service that can solve the paywall problem
elegantly. I don't use music subscription services because I want to keep the
music, purchasing a file makes more sense. But I never save articles, I don't
have the time to re-read them. Subscription seems perfect.

How much would I pay for such a service? Potentially a lot. If it could get me
past any paywall or even just the most common ones I run into, I might pay a
hundred bucks a month for it. I can consume a _lot_ of long-form articles,
many many more than I can books or movies. Subscribing to a magazine has too
little signal-to-noise, I'm not looking for just any article to read. Nor do I
have enough time to read a whole magazine.

~~~
matt4077
There is /r/thelongread or /r/longform I believe. Part of the problem is
actually not discovery but availability – there just isn't that much longform
content.

If you keep an eye on vanity fair, the atlantic, new yorker, the sunday times
and a few others, you're likely to read most of the good stuff.

Better revenue streams might increase the supply. You are right that a model
similar to music is needed – I'm not going to pay 100$+/year for a magazine
subscription, but I'd gladly pay 40$/month for 'the netflix of journalism'.
I've also seen quite a lot of writers publish kindle shorts which could become
'the itunes of journalism'.

~~~
UweSchmidt
40$ would be too much for most people though, right? When the dust settles it
will be at <10$/€ per month like the music and movie streaming services for
all-you-can-read.

~~~
marincounty
Yea $40 is too much--at least for me. What I find weird about reading HN links
is many times I get to the meat of the story by reading the free comments?

Actually, I think the free comments are what make HN great?

------
stefantalpalaru
> The guards gave the Americans a choice: Surrender the undocumented
> merchandise and enter Austria, or turn back into war-torn Eastern Europe.

What war? This was Hungary in 1994, 4-5 years after a surprisingly peaceful
end of communist rule.

~~~
mxfh
Couldn't get around the sensationalism either. There was no war in Eastern
Europe at large in '94\. There were the Yugoslav/Balkan wars, but they were
exclusively on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Especially the borders of
Austria were never in danger, let alone the Austrian/Hungarian border. At it's
early height there was the Ten-Day War in Slovenia in '91, which was the
closest the war came to Western Europe and its magnitude was less of that of
one month of the ongoing conflict in Donbass/Ukraine.

Even speaking of Hungary, which shares a border with Croatia, Slovenia, some
with Serbia further south east[corrected], but not Bosnia the situation was
tense but not war-torn. The peak of the Croatian part of the Yugoslav wars was
over with the 1992 ceasefire.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-Day_War](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten-
Day_War)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_War_of_Independence)

~~~
foobarian
Hungary does share a border with Serbia, though whether you consider Vojvodina
Serbia or not could be debated.

------
systemtheory
anyone else not clicking on the link since it's playboy.com?

~~~
systemtheory
-4 pts... wtf just happened

