Post #758308 by Swanky on Wed, Feb 3, 2016 10:27 AM

First, interest and activity on TC is not at all an indicator of interest in Tiki. As you said, message boards are not used much and the real purpose of TC was research and that is a dwindling thing as years go by. The other things that you may associate with TC are handled by modern communications of Instagram, FB, CL and eBay. Attendance at events is rising.

As for mug values, I personally believe the trend is for people to buy new and not vintage. The OG Tiki peeps were into vintage because we were also into the research. And we also were buying when it could be found cheap. The market is finite and only so many people are looking for a Steve Crane Bird Bowl and the price keeps dropping. However, this is a very well documented item. Check Ooga-Mooga and you see the price is all over the place. The average is $225 but it has sold for over $300 several times lately and for less than $150.

Same for the Barrel and the Drum.

I'd say I don't see a dropping pattern here, but I do see that there is always a chance to get a mug cheap (relatively).

And you may also be seeing a more savvy set of buyers who don't bid until the last few seconds. I'd be more curious to see the numbers of Sold Tiki items than those with bids. If the number of listed items is steady, is the number of Sold items steady?

The Tiki world is evolving. TC is going to continue to lose active users. It's an unpopular format. And a lot of what was exciting 10 years ago is nearly dead, i.e. new findings, new questions, new research. The cocktail experts were doing a lot through blogs, but blogs are losing some steam lately too. More people interested in cocktails, but that won't be seen here. They are not coming here as much anymore because phpBB is an unpopular format.