Grave Considerations: Keeping the Boxes

Recently, Maz at the terrific TFSource blog documented his purging of boxes and packaging materials. I think this is an interesting topic to explore, so I thought I’d try working my way through it. I’m not an in-box collector, but like Maz, do hang on to some and certain boxes for a variety of reasons, and after an initial response of terror to what he was doing, I figured I should examine the idea myself.

I don’t keep many boxes, but the ones I do keep tend to be larger ones. Masterpiece figures for prime example come in real large, space-consuming boxes that are often much larger than they need to be to house the figure inside. Third party figures sometimes come in excellent packaging as well, yet nothing so far that can rival a Masterpiece box. Reissue or special edition figures may come in boxes that are considered worth holding on to. But I don’t display things in box, nor do I display boxes. So why keep them?

With this, my examination may begin. I don’t keep boxes for any display purpose, so why do I keep them? I’ve come up with three reasons: storage, resale value, and aesthetics. As I feel my chest tightening at the thought of throwing these boxes away, let’s see if I can find a good, rational reason to keep them.

First up is storage. I keep the boxes for Star Wars Black Series figures, mainly because if I decide to put some of them away, I know I can pop them back into their packages. This would keep the figure safe and also allow for weapons to be kept with the figure they go with. Being an Imperial collector, I’ve got a whole bunch of the same blasters, and there isn’t much distinction between them, or even among which one belongs to which figure. Exchanging Sandtrooper blasters makes no difference, since the weapon is the same for all three Sandtroopers. To make this a more foolish idea, I don’t even keep the weapons in the boxes if they aren’t being wielded by the figure. In the drawer of my desk is a plastic bag containing a slew of extra blasters. Black Series figures don’t come with any paperwork of stands or anything. So the boxes are all literally empty. But, if I wanted to, I could put the figures back in their packages. Am I going to do that ever? Probably. What if we move? Wouldn’t it be best to pack these toys up in their boxes for a move? Wouldn’t that be great for Masterpiece Transformers? Isn’t that how I’ve moved before, a few times in my life by now? Well, yes and no, as I’ve generally had no problems moving my collection of loose figures before: it’s not like I keep all the boxes, so that general retail toys are being repackaged for transit. I stop and think that, if and when we move again, I could just bubble wrap Masterpiece figures, and pack them in a box well, and that’s all that would be needed. Then, I think, “What about those little pointy bits on the tailfins of the original Masterpiece Seeker mold? Wouldn’t those stand the chance of breaking if I just wrapped them?” So again, boxes for safety, for transport.

I currently have most of my collection housed in a large closet in our apartment. It is a multipurpose closet, also holding shoes and coats, as well as things from my wife’s collection. We both have boxes from figures, but the ones belonging to me are much, much larger. The boxes that I keep for storage purposes are themselves a storage liability. They take up lots of room in this closet, which then causes the closet to become fairly quickly cluttered and disorganized, which then bothers my wife. Most, but not all, of them are on a shelf that is out of the way, and thus shouldn’t be an issue; but if my storage needs for empty boxes were resolved, couldn’t I move other things up there and out of the way? Boxes containing Black Series boxes could disappear, and some other things could take their place. That’s a pretty appealing idea. And anyway, if I’m keeping boxes for the future event of moving, what would I then do with them, after that future move was completed? Put them in another closet, in another place? Would I throw them away at my new location? Let’s be honest: probably not. They’d probably end up the same as they did when we moved to our current apartment: shoved into a closet somewhere, for some reason. In the meantime, I have figures on display, and eventually tire of them. I put them and their parts into plastic bags, and then store them in large plastic containers that are also in this large closet. Wouldn’t I continue doing that in the future? I just put away a couple Titans Return figures last weekend, and just bagged them and then stored them.

So honestly, the storage argument doesn’t seem to be all that strong. My second rationale is that of the resale value of figures. Every so often, I make trips through my collection and weed out things that I no longer find a place for. In November of last year I got rid of all but one live action movie Transformer figure, because they don’t fit the overall look of my collection and, in honesty, they aren’t that great as toys. I’d amassed a lot of them over the last ten years of movies because they were the toys available at the time, or because I did have some sense of excitement for them when they were first released. Now, all I still have is the Leader class Starscream from the Revenge of the Fallen line, which was purchased for me back then by my wife. I didn’t have any of the boxes for those toys, and had no trouble getting rid of them. I don’t really view my collection as an investment: I don’t but a toy today in the hopes that its value will increase in ten years. We’ve lived through that phenomena as Star Wars or G1 Transformers collectors, but the toys themselves are not valuable because of their age, but rather the nostalgia or importance that we as buyers put on them. Ours is a completely astroturfed marketplace. I recently sold off two Masterpiece figures, Toys R Us exclusives Acid Storm and the original Rodimus, mainly because neither really did anything for me despite having owned them for years. Acid Storm I bought because we had gone to Toys R Us looking for Masterpiece Soundwave, which we didn’t find, but ended up with something anyway. Plus, Seeker, so. Acid Storm had his package; Rodimus did not. Both sold for amounts that I was happy with. I can’t bring myself to believe that someone would really pay retail price or higher for a used figure, even if it is in the original package.

But if I’m not planning on reselling the figure, why should I keep the box, which we’ve already established isn’t doing anything of value for me or the figure or my collection? Acid Storm was sold because he’d been sitting in the box for so long, I’d almost forgotten I owned him. And how much does the package add to the value of a recently available figure? When I try to sell things off, it’s mostly to get rid of dead collection weight, and not primarily for the financial gain. What would the box add? Ten dollars? Maybe? Is it worth ten extra bucks to keep a box for years on the chance that I might make a few extra dollars on a sale? What about figures then that I know I have no intentions of selling? What about the six Hades team members that I so happily own? No plans on getting rid of them. Couldn’t I pitch the boxes and be ok with it? I don’t keep the card backs of figures on the chance that I tire of them and want to sell them off. Although, I was doing that for a while, back in like 2011, and I don’t have any idea why. I just was. I’m pretty sure I’ve since thrown all of that stuff away though.

So the resale argument doesn’t seem all that strong either. The final reason that I keep the packages is for aesthetic value, like the packaging is really nice looking. The recently mentioned Hades figures came in gorgeous boxes, and some of my hopefully next third party targets do as well. Some of them, like the Hercules and Ares figures, come in pretty generic window packages, and don’t offer much beyond a cartoonish image of the figure on them. Certainly, I could do away with those without much trouble, right? There is some overlap here with the resale idea, as expensive third party figures would probably be more valuable to a different collector if they were really complete, like with box, right? But the figures are unsealed and displayed, so even with the box, they can’t ever really be like original condition, right? And, I don’t have any plans of selling those third party figures, right? No is the answer to that, possibly to the dismay of my wife, who finds herself increasingly surrounded by combiners and periodically listens as I speak desirously of another one. But I feel that the packaging is a real part of the third party figure experience, even if I can’t specify exactly why. So I’ve been amassing a pile of boxes from third party figures which aren’t housing accessories or instructions or anything like that, so, again, why am I keeping them? I don’t keep the figures in the boxes, I don’t display the boxes, and I have no plans for doing either. Maybe if I were going to put the figures away, which brings us back to the storage argument, and while I’ve got no current plans to do so, if I were to put the figures away, wouldn’t I just bag them up and store them? I think I like the third party boxes because they add a strong level of professionalism to small company releases: the packaging makes independent companies look like they can hold their own against major manufacturers. The Black Series retailer exclusive sets tend to be really excellent looking packages as well.

Out of the three arguments here, the aesthetic one is the hardest to refute. It’s also the hardest one to defend for me personally. “The box looks nice, so I keep it” is by any rational metric a weak position. Their visual value is really only accessible if they are used for display, as you can’t see the boxes inside my closet. So, why am I keeping all of them?

I don’t really have an answer to that, or at least not one that I think would be valid. I fear getting rid of the boxes I’ve kept because then they will be gone. That’s basically it. What if, years from now, I get the desire to either put away or sell off some of these things? Wouldn’t it be better to have the boxes for them? Since I can’t come up with any real or rational answer for these questions, shouldn’t I be able to get rid of all these packages? Yeah, I should.

They aren’t adding anything to my collection, or my collecting experience. They are really just taking up space. I guess the hardest part would be letting go. Somewhere in my neurotic toy collector mind, a voice is yelling “If you throw them away, there’s no going back!” And that’s true. If these boxes end up in my garbage, there won’t be any pulling them out and reconstituting them. They would be gone to all but memory. Can I stand to let them go? During a break at work, I think, “Sure, I could start with the Black Series boxes, and throw them away this weekend.” And then I feel afraid. What if as soon as the dumpster lid closes, I realize I’ve made a real mistake? This may be a project best carried out in stages, over a little bit of time, rather than as one large venture. At the same time, my brain is amassing a list of boxes that I could get rid of first. Maybe I’m trying to tell me something. If I got rid of the obvious boxes, I’d at very least have a place to stack boxes I’m undecided on for the time being, allowing me to actually do this in stages instead of making it into an all-at-once-or-nothing project. Perhaps an issue I have with this project is the notion that it would take one afternoon, and I’d be free of a dozen large cardboard boxes. That makes it feel like there is no alternative or no way to do this that isn’t a complete burning down of everything.

Once again, the thing that is keeping me from committing to this project and feeling good about it is something unknown, yet not entirely rational. I have nothing to actually lose except for boxes. Why can I not just commit? Part of being a collector is amassing things, if that needs to be specified. But we have to know what kind of collectors we are: and if one isn’t an in-the-box collector, what good are boxes as part of a collection? All they’re doing in mine is taking up space, and I seem to realize that. If I’m not going to be selling the figures, then hanging on to the boxes can be attributed to further less defendable arguments, and I probably should do something about that. This isn’t an undertaking that’s going to make me any happier, or put me in better touch with my collection, or anything like that; it won’t yield me any money or anything, the way a good thinning of the collection does. A good purging of unwanted figures does good, like clearing out underbrush or grooming your cat, and I don’t know if I think that throwing out boxes is going to have quite that same effect. Regardless, something that can’t be disputed here is that I am holding on to boxes for hypothetical reasons that are pretty easily defeated when scrutinized, and I think that’s something that I should take as a serious signal that they are unnecessary. Whether or not I can bring myself to do anything about it, well, that’s another story, and one that I’ll have to update us on later. Sure, a lot of boxes, but they are out of the way; and, whatever I do with the existing boxes will serve as a standard for future boxes. So there’s a lot riding on this decision. And that, too, makes my chest hurt. I don’t know though: I know myself, and I know how it feels once my brain has made a decision that my collector’s brain or heart may not be sure of, or isn’t yet committed to, and this feels like one of those times where I’ve already made a decision, but just haven’t yet accepted it as reality. I guess we’ll see what the weekend holds.