Post #758383 by JenTiki on Thu, Feb 4, 2016 8:13 AM

Okay, I actually have a response to the original question of this thread. Fair warning: this may get rambly.

I think tiki buying ebbs and flows with the economy, as do most things. Personally, when I discovered there was actually a tiki "scene" and there were other people who were into tiki even more than I (because I didn't know it was really a "thing" anymore), I started snapping up all the mugs I could cheaply get my hands on. Living in the SF Bay Area at the time and being a single woman paying my own bills, I couldn't spend as much as I'd like to get a lot of the highly-sought vintage mugs, so I got the Tiki Farms and a few Munktikis because that's what I could afford. I went overboard on eBay buying anything I thought looked cool, regardless of the history. I'm obsessive like that.

Then I ran out of space.

Collecting takes up a lot of room, and living in small 1-bdrm apartments makes it difficult to display everything and I'm not a believer of collecting things I can't see and enjoy on a regular basis. I started focusing my buying on mugs from venues I've actually visited, or historic mugs from places I love like the Tonga Room in San Francisco or Trader Vic's in Emeryville. Eventually I began selling off some of the mugs I acquired during my initial buying frenzy to make room to really appreciate the mugs I truly loved. I still have well over a hundred mugs, but most of them actually mean something to me, and I can see all of them at once after having several boxes of them that never got opened in my last two homes.

When I started collecting, some of the vintage mugs that I actually wanted were going for hundreds of dollars. Then when the economy crashed, I noticed nobody was willing to pay those prices anymore. We all got a little more selective about where our hard-earned dollars were going. As my rent went up faster than my income, my willingness to spend $80-$120 on a favorite artist's new creation, no matter how much I wanted it, diminished greatly. I think that happened to a lot of people. Now the economy is recovering and people are no longer as scared about whether or not they'll have jobs tomorrow. But being careful with how you spend your money is a hard habit to break once you've been doing it a while. So I think it may be a few more years before folks get comfortable spending so much on "frivolous" purchases again.

Now I've moved across the country and my cost of living has dropped significantly, so for the first time in my life I have discretionary income. But I've chosen to spend it on travel, experiences, and yes, booze, rather than more mugs that I don't personally connect to. Plus I can always just pop over the mountains to Swanky's place if I want to look at vintage Steve Crane and Mai Kai mugs. :)

My love of tiki has also evolved into a love of good cocktails and rum. I was lucky enough to live close to Forbidden Island and Smuggler's Cove, so I've been drinking really good tiki drinks for the past 10 years. I started learning about rum and the other ingredients necessary to make good tiki drinks. That led me to other spirits and other classic cocktails that weren't necessarily tiki drinks. Now that I live in a tiki-less part of the country with really stupid liquor laws, I have to make my own drinks at home if I want something I'll really enjoy. So I buy cocktail ingredients and barware instead of tiki mugs (that I rarely use for drinking).

There are still a few vintage mugs I would like to have, and if I happen to see them at a good price I might buy them, but I'd rather have a $125 bottle of a great sipping rum that I can enjoy and share with (really good) friends, than a mug that sits on a crowded shelf serving no purpose other than decoration that my guests will never appreciate.