I Compared CONE TOP Auction Prices

[MI-Cans]

@Beercanpete

If I had lives enough, I've thought for a long time it would be interesting to learn some techniques from my son (who just graduated with a Master's in Data Science) where one could access all the data available from previous auctions and put it together in some coherent format. It could be done, but I don't know the tools well enough to do that. Can you imagine having 5-10 years of data for every can in USBC I and II and the Lilek books to pore over? Hours of fun and a valuable guide for all of us!

I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but this probably the top of my skills with Excel.

@dmorean Thank you Dan, for allowing everyone access to your Auction history on your website. Without that, I could not have done this.

Details worth knowing...

• Total of 39 Auctions between February of 2017 and July of 2022.

• Total of 14,636 items auctioned off.

• I assigned each auction an ID using "DM" and a numerical value based on the order that the auctions took place.

• I broke the items down into the following categories:
  Cone Tops, Crowntainers, Instructionals, Flat Tops, Zip Tops, Pull Tabs, Gallons, Test Cans, Drinkware, Signs, Lithos, Knobs, Trays, Tip Trays and finally Miscellaneous.

I screwed up by selecting the first category rather than using one of the smaller categories. I didn't think about it until after I already began the process. The Cone Top worksheet has 2,900 items. So be it! That's what I worked on and is now finished.

You can only compare items with the same CAN ID. Luckily, a lot of the named items included a CAN ID but that created a different problem. Computers are stupid. They recognize "0" (zero) as a number. I had to go through the entire list and add a zero to and single digit number (170-9 had to actually be 170-09 in order to sort properly).

The cans that had no CAN ID, well, I had to go to each location in the archive and see if it had a CAN ID number. THose that had no reference number or were designated as unlisted are shown as "N/L".

Mr. Morean's archive was never intended as a true database, just an informational record. Pick a named brand group and you'll see naming variations, misspellings, skipped punctuation marks and such. This is the reason a CAN ID is critical data. Click to enlarge.





Once the CAN ID's were finished, I sorted each brand by those CAN ID numbers. Then I also sorted each group by their respective dates. So, find a can you're looking for, select all with the same number and you'll see the selling dates for each.

I thought of several possible layouts and settled on this one, possibly being the easiest to use and understand.

It's in PDF format even though I did the work in Excel. I doubt anyone would want to print it anyway.





Side Note: I wanted to include the Good Guys Auctions but their archive has a programming glitch which I have mentioned to them. Maybe a future project?

Also forgot to mention that my detailed searching found 41 Crowntainers labeled as Cone Tops (list at bottom of final page.) It looks like every Crowntainer in the proper category was named "Crowntainer Cone Top". These 41 omitted the word "Crowntainer" from the Item Name so they ended up in the Cone Top category.

(MI-Cans)

[HiJax]

Wow. What a fantastic and useful piece of work. Thanks to you and your herculean effort. Kudos to Dan also. It's comical how so many of the cans sell at prices with absolutely no consistency. I guess that's true with any auction, but when you see it starkly on the page it's eye opening. I bet the fellow who paid over 10 times the price for his Oertel's 92 than the other 5 winners feels a little foolish. See 175-23. Good lands!

[MI-Cans]

Wow. What a fantastic and useful piece of work. Thanks to you and your herculean effort. Kudos to Dan also. It's comical how so many of the cans sell at prices with absolutely no consistency. I guess that's true with any auction, but when you see it starkly on the page it's eye opening. I bet the fellow who paid over 10 times the price for his Oertel's 92 than the other 5 winners feels a little foolish. See 175-23. Good lands!

That is not alone in that kind of outlier. Hard to explain or rationalize. Click to enlarge.

How about this one?

NOTE: I updated the Iroquois image because I found a can on the BC+ site. Now there's four. Three on the left make sense. The one on the right is in another universe!

(MI-Cans)

[pinnacle-project]

Using the Indian Head Ale as an example, I wonder if this kind of inconsistency in values has always been present in our hobby but we are only now paying attention to them because of the very high prices some cans are reaching.

At SummerSwap, I was talking to The Good Guys a bit about can prices. Of course, the cans that are going for crazy high prices get a lot of attention but there are still good prices to be found. I was happy to buy a Berghof cone from them earlier this summer at a "pre COVID" price. I also got some really, really good deals at SummerSwap. For a patient person, I think good deals can still be found. For a person with money burning a hole in their pocket, they will pay huge prices so they can have the can immediately.

[clevelandcanman11389]

2 good perfect examples. How do these guys get be multi millionaires by not doing a sliver of research what the value of a can should be.

[Nobes1010]

Thank you so much for doing this!! Really awesome.

[Dan B]

What glitch? Using the good guys past auctions under the search tab type in what can you want to view? Say you type in Sterling, every Sterling can will show up from every auction.

Dan B

[Dan B]

Or if you wanted to use a broader spectrum like “cone top” yes that takes awhile to load. Ours will not only show the title, but photos of every cone top too. So, it does take plenty of time to load that all up.

Dan B

[MI-Cans]

@Dan B

Or if you wanted to use a broader spectrum like “cone top” yes that takes awhile to load. Ours will not only show the title, but photos of every cone top too. So, it does take plenty of time to load that all up.
Dan B

Thanks for responding.

I agree that anyone can search for a particular brand globally across all your auctions. I've done it. I've used it.

What's not working is the ability to select a particular Auction for simple perusal or comparison. Example, I want to search your May 22nd Double Platinum Beer Can Auction for any of the following: did I miss any cans that were within my budget, what was the highest price paid for any one item, is there something I can discuss with a collector friend regarding this Auction or maybe it's just a simple overall curiosity.

Your software used to allow selection of an entire event, plain and simple.

Here's a screen dump of the screen just before I put the cursor on that event and select it. Click to enlarge.

The moment I select that event, the screen changes barring any other input and produces this error screen. If you read the yellow bar, we all know there wouldn't be a single event in your archive that contains "over 5000 results". That's the glitch.

I also agree that a broad search like CONE TOPS will work. I just tried it and it produced 1,220 cans (including the not yet held event).

For me it was part of an experiment to show that data could be trended but not necessarily proving anything. I believe it's just a curiosity for many of the Hobbyists. Some trending numbers make sense while others are insanely inexplicable. I tried to show that data can be compared if CAN ID's are included with the archive and that's what has to be the common denominator to compare apples to apples.

I know your archives are not intended to be databases. I appreciate the ability to access and search them.

Thank you for everything you do for the Chapter and the Hobby.

Respectfully,

(MI-Cans)

[menke]

In answer to a previous question, yes, there have always been at least some outliers. Here in the east there was a particular seller and a particular buyer who I saw cross paths at least twice with grotesquely inflated (realized) prices in the 10x range ($400 can with a 4500k tag, $10 misprint sold as a 500 or so unique test can). It sank in to me that said seller (not one of our established professional dealers) was targeting one particular buyer with cans he knew the guy needed and wouldn't worry about the price tag or have the patience to wait on. These auctions have all the privacy from the public eye that high-end buyers want, it's anonymous to all but the auctioneer, so there's probably no embarrassment from prying eyes.