Jeremy Herbert
Nine years ago, I traversed the World’s Longest Yard Sale to figure out what VHS tapes were worth. Last month, at a much smaller yard sale, I watched a grown man ask ChatGPT how much he should charge me for his French copy of Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. With a deathly chill down my spine on that unseasonably sweltering winter day, I knew; it was time for a sequel.
Since last I worked the VCR beat, the world either started ending or picked up considerable speed. Years were lost to plague. The most tangible threat of nuclear war since J. Robert Oppenheimer won Best Actor has been looming for about a month now. The AI industry is still playing chicken with free markets, fresh water, human curiosity, and viable careers in culture writing. And, a little farther down the apocalyptic list, magnetic tape lost another 10% to 20% of its luster.
Yet, according to Guinness, the most expensive VHS tape in the history of the format was just sold in 2022 for $75,000, and a $114,000 auction four months later remains unverified. These are not films stranded on the reels, that collectors lust after and pirates co-opt to launder their links. The contenders are Back to the Future and Star Wars. Runners-up include Top Gun, Ghostbusters, Jaws, and The Goonies.
The yard salesman said the chatbot appraised the French Menace at $10. I put it down, then he showed his hand and iPhone—the AI helpfully provided two quotes, a higher range for eBay listings and a lower range for this particular occasion. He had tried the former on me. I paid $2.
Last time around, I concluded that, although nobody knows what VHS tapes are worth, most agree it can’t be much. Chaos may still reign, but the consensus has undeniably shifted.
Now for some anecdotal archaeology. I trawl the thrift stores, antique malls, and flea markets of Central Florida with such rigor that I maintain a digital guidebook for close associates. I also act as an obtainer of rare non-antiquities for them, sending field reports on the latest rich vein of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. As for me, unless it’s a tape of preordained interest—I am regrettably down to the $20 holdouts of the Universal Monsters Classic Collection—$2 is about as much as I’m willing to gamble on a polypropylene husk that may or may not contain a movie. I’ll pay more for a friend, but my usual haunts rarely break double digits anyhow. At least, they never used to.
It’s now a crapshoot as to whether or not any given Goodwill, some less than four miles apart, sells its tapes at $0.59 flat or prices each of them on an inscrutable curve, like an instructional video for the Professional Power DR® Chipper marked up 500% to $2.99. At the same community event where my curiosity to hear French-accented Gungan got the better of me, some sellers slapped $15 stickers on Disney clamshells, likely due to a half-assed Buzzfeed list that was already outdated last time I cited it, and took my wandering gaze as reason enough to defend themselves: “You can’t find those anymore.”
But you can. I find them all the time, with and without crinkled gashes where some kid atomic-elbowed them shut. Right now on eBay, the same site that Buzzfeed used to claim Beauty and the Beast was worth $500, you can buy it outright for $5.48. But the VHS market is no longer online, if it ever really was, nor does it abide by old-fashioned concepts like “supply” and “demand.”
How else do you account for a copy of Batman, “The Movie of the Decade” that sold a staggering 15 million copies by Christmas 1989, going for $15, three shy of its original retail value and six of a reference-quality UHD Blu-ray, 37 years on? That’s the reality at the VHS-heaviest vintage shop in town, left anonymous as a symptom rather than the disease. Those I scout for swear by it or used to, before the baseline crept from $3 to $7. Per the owner, what we’re really paying for is restoration—cleaned hardware—and curation—no Professional Power DR® Chippers allowed. Well, the former doesn’t matter because one friend watched their $10 copy of Attack of the Clones (English) disintegrate after a single viewing like an IMF job offer.
To investigate the latter, I reached out to see what the going rates might be for collectors looking to unload. To my surprise, they barely buy in-store at all, instead scouting estate sales and eBay lots for buried treasure. The kindly employee complained that it’s a chore getting rid of all the common junk that comes with it. But if that means writing off twelve copies of Lethal Weapon 3 at $10 a pop, then I’m in the wrong business.
But, present word count excluded, I’m not in business at all. I buy these movies as a clandestine alternative to VOD rentals. I dig to feel dirt under my nails. My siren song is the tattletale chirp of a charity shop’s dying smoke alarm. If a bounty goes unclaimed, I release the tapes back into the wild for someone else to find and pray that whoever does isn’t cross-referencing how much some appraisal company claims they might be worth.
“If you’re going to be a parasite, trying to enrich yourself off of garbage you find in a dumpster,” said Red Letter Media co-host Rich Evans in a controversial video about VHS grading services, “it’s a very useful tool.” The YouTube channel’s popular Best of the Worst series gazes regularly into the standard-def abyss and often culminates in the creative destruction of the winningest loser(s). Once fans started sending in copies of Nukie, a 1987 South African E.T. knock-off, the creative team decided to test the value of VHS for themselves by having their best copy graded and feeding the rest to a woodchipper (not a Professional Power DR®, though someone has almost certainly mailed them the how-to). Despite the lone survivor clearing the current Guinness record to rack up $80,600 for charity, responses from the be-kind-rewind crowd tended vitriolic, with some even comparing the act to a book burning. However, as fellow RLM co-host Jay Bauman later pointed out, magnetic tape is not only mortal but terminally ill. Anyone fearing for the film’s survival can still watch it on the Internet Archive. That upload only has 3,572 views. The video about destroying it? 2.1 million.
Collecting VHS tapes is no longer about collecting their contents. The only copies that earn top marks and five-digit sales are sealed, meaning the dubiously qualified appraisers can’t even guarantee the tape inside isn’t blank. They are worth their packaging now, steering the market away from vinyl and other media toward toy collectors who mortgage homes to fill them with unopenable boxes of plastic memory. The wayward souls with dusty VCRs and a little petty cash may not be paying luxury-car prices for Back to the Future, but that vintage shop is expecting $15 for something that McDonald’s gave away for less than half with the purchase of every Big Mac. Why? Because nostalgia is the only commodity that goes up when everything else goes down, and yesterday’s business is booming.
Nine years ago on the World’s Longest Yard Sale, I scored a copy of C.H.U.D. for one dollar. I filed that write-up before discovering there was nothing on it but static and white noise. The vintage store was out of stock. A cursory glance at eBay clocks it around $30 these days. I obviously can’t in good conscience donate it anywhere, wouldn’t sell it in the first place, but I still have that tape, carried it across the country twice now. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, only that I don’t want to get rid of it.
That tape reminds me of better times, and those are a lot more expensive than they used to be.
