What’s the value of something? Is that the same as it’s worth?
When I visited my grandfather as a kid, we’d spend some time with his stamp collection. I loved the smell, the shoeboxes full of colorful unsorted potential treasure, the neatly arranged books of post-sorted commemoratives, first-day covers, and plate blocks, the stories behind the images on the stamps, and being a voyeur to a person with a passion project.
I had various jobs. One job was to slog through the shoeboxes full of loose stamps and sort what I found — US 1 centers in this pile, 1960s UK with Queen Elizabeth in another, etc. My other job was to take sorted piles and cross-reference them against the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue to generate an estimated value. To do so, I had to find the match in the catalog through its objective characteristics — US, green, 1 cent, Ben Franklin — and then make an assessment of its quality.
Determining quality was a subjective exercise bounded by some pseudo-objective guidelines. Is it used? Is it postmarked? What is the condition of the perforations? How about the shade of the color and the crispness of the image? Is that a desirable and unique flaw, or just a pedestrian flaw?
I’d come up with a number and show it to my grandfather.
“This pile here is worth about $24.50.”
He’d take a look and quickly assess my assessment for himself.
“Eh, maybe I could get half of that.”
“But then why does the catalog say $24.50?”
“The catalog shows retail value. You can’t actually get retail value. You’ll only get what someone will be willing to pay.”
Huh? Willing to pay? My ten years of experience with our transactional economy included, to this point, only price tags and cashiers. Here’s the listed price. I hand that much to the cashier and walk out with the thing.
What does “willing to pay” mean?
One time, he rummaged through his cabinet, pulled out a unique, longish box, and handed it to me.
“It’s been a while since I’ve assessed what this lot here is worth. Maybe you can take a stab at it.”
I opened it to reveal hundreds of first-day covers encased in cellophane wrappers. All from northeastern Pennsylvania. I grabbed the catalog and went to work. The problem I found was that the catalog was equal parts vague (ie, missing much of what I found in his collection) and ultra-specific (ie, the catalog showed only a particular cover with the stamp in question).
After an hour or so, I wasn’t making much progress.
“I don’t how to come up with a value.”
“Yeah, I figured as much. Here’s the next lesson…”
And he explained that this part of his collection was his personal favorite. He had spent a lot of time, effort, and money building it up to what it was. Our family has roots in NE PA and he found this intersection of philatelic history and personal history interesting and nostalgic. He just liked it.
It had a lot of personal value to him but didn’t necessarily have much value to anybody else.
So what’s it worth? Only what someone else is willing to pay.
What’s your product or service’s value and worth? Find the people who value what you do.
