Why trust these numbers

The same mug, the same week, in three places.

Wisconsin. Listed as rare. Asking
Three days later, still unsold.

Wisconsin. Another seller, same week. Asking

What that series actually goes for. Sold
Two mugs, marked sold by the seller.

One of those sellers is wrong. Without knowing what things actually sell for, you cannot tell which — and almost nobody knows what things actually sell for.

The problem

Everyone is guessing from everyone else's guesses.

Ask a collector what a mug is worth and they will check what other people are asking for it, then price slightly under. That is not their fault. It is the only number available.

Sold prices are almost impossible to see. The big auction site closed its sold data to outsiders. Most trades between collectors happen in private messages and leave no trace at all.

So an invented price can circulate for years, and each person who repeats it makes it look more real.

What we do instead: every price we record says whether it Sold or was only Asking, with the date and where it came from. If we do not know, it says Unknown and stays out of the maths.

Where the numbers come from

From collectors, about mugs they actually bought.

There are no prices on this site yet, and this page is the reason why.

Everything below describes what has been built and what it refuses to do. It switches on when there is something honest to show, which means when enough collectors have recorded what they actually paid. Not on a date, and not because a launch needed a feature.

A page headed why trust these numbers that quietly invented some would be answering its own question.

There is no clever way around the sold-price problem. Nobody publishes the data, and scraping it from somewhere that does not want it shared would be a poor foundation for a site asking to be trusted.

So the numbers come from collectors here. When you record what you paid for a mug, that is a sold price. Money changed hands. It is the one thing this hobby has never had written down anywhere.

You are asked before any of it is used. The first time you record a price, a plain question comes up: can we include it, anonymously, in what other collectors see? Nothing is pre-ticked and no answer is assumed. Saying no changes nothing about how the site works for you, and you can change your mind whenever you like.

Your name is never attached to a price. Not shown, not stored, not recoverable. There is no route from a figure on the screen back to a person.

Nothing appears until two different people have bought it. One price is one person, and one person is identifiable. Below two, the mug says nothing at all rather than saying something thin.

You see a range and a count, not a verdict. Three purchases, £16 to £24 can be judged by someone holding the mug. Worth £20 cannot, and it would be pretending to a confidence nobody has yet.

Currencies are never mixed together. A Manila price averaged with a Chicago price is a price for neither.

This starts small and it is meant to. Most mugs will say nothing for a long while, because most mugs will not have two recorded purchases for a long while. A site that showed a confident figure for all six hundred on day one would be making them up.

What almost nobody records

Turn the mug over.

The front is the picture. The bottom is where the mug is identified. Where it was made, what year, whether the barcode is still there. All of it is printed on the base, and none of it is printed on the front.

Sometimes it moves the price. Sometimes it moves nothing. Which is which is one of the things this is being built to find out, and saying so is more use to you than a number we made confident.

A barcode still on the bottom

+12.5%, once

One seller, one week, torn against intact. Then a second seller priced four torn-and-intact pairs identically. So we can show you two mugs are different. We cannot yet tell you what that difference is worth, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Asking

Glass instead of ceramic

4×

Same series, same country, same week. The catalogues do not separate them. Asking

One version against another

6.3×

against . Both marked sold by the same seller, so this one is measured sold against sold. Sold

Show us the base of yours and we will tell you which one you have got. Nobody can work that out from the front.

One number cannot work

A common city mug, four countries, one week.

Where	Asked or paid
United States	Sold
Philippines	≈ Asking
Canada	≈ Asking
Germany	≈ Asking

Converted for comparison only. We always store what was actually paid, in the money it was paid in. These are not all the same series — which is part of the point, because nobody has ever put them side by side.

Publish a single worldwide figure and it is wrong for most of the people reading it. Prices here will always be regional, and always say how many sales they came from. Under five, and we will tell you it is too thin to price rather than invent one.

What we have not got

The list is incomplete, and it always will be.

Five days after this went live, three new releases turned up in a collectors' group that were not on our list. That will keep happening. Any catalogue that claims to be finished is either lying or has stopped looking.

So every entry carries a mark saying how far we would stand behind it:

Verified — a collector has photographed it, or we have held it

Listed — it appears in a published reference, or two collectors added it independently

Member added — one person says it exists. Nothing more than that yet

Disputed — someone says this is wrong, and it stays visible while we sort it out

Right now 651 mugs across 453 places, and not one of them is marked Verified, because nobody has photographed one for us yet. We would rather show you that than pretend.

Nothing ever gets quietly deleted either. If an entry turns out to be wrong it is marked as disputed and stays where it is — because somebody may own it, and because a list that silently loses things is no use for an insurance claim or a family sorting out an estate.

Rules we have written down

Five things this will never do.

Never buy, sell, or hold a single mug. No marketplace and no middleman. We sell our own postcards, printed from your photographs, and nothing else — never a mug, and never yours. We introduce two collectors and give them both the same honest numbers to agree on. What you settle on is between you.

Never earn a commission on anything we value. We will not take a cut of your sale. If we made money on trades we could not publish honest prices for the same mugs, and the prices are the point.

Never publish a figure we cannot back. Every price says how many sales it came from. Too few, and it says so instead of guessing.

Never fold the postage into the price. Shipping is recorded separately, always. On a cheap mug it can be most of what you paid.

Never convert your money without telling you. What you paid is stored in the currency you paid it in. Conversions happen on the screen, at the rate on the day of the sale, and are labelled.

Free to track. The prices are not here yet.

Ticking off what you own, the map, and writing down who you were with: all three work with no account and no signal. That is deliberate. They have to work while you are stood in the shop with the mug in your hand.

The tracker is free and it stays free. We do sell one thing, a postcard made from a trip you have already logged, and it is entirely optional. That is the shop. Nothing in the tracker is behind it.

What other collectors paid does not exist on this site today. It cannot, because it is made of what collectors record, and nobody has recorded enough yet. When it does exist it will need an account, because it is built out of what people put in and it is not something to leave lying about on the open internet.

Recording what you paid is how it gets built. You are asked once, nothing is pre-ticked, and no is a complete answer.

Start ticking off my mugs

← Back to the start

I built this because I walked four and a half miles across Naples in the heat, stood in front of the one I actually needed, and walked away from it — because I could not check. If you collect these too, tell me what is missing and I will fix it.
Simon