Spooning For Money Won’t Keep You Warm At Night

Spooning. I don’t know if that is the name that anyone deep in the game would call it, but it’s what I am going with.

I’m talking about high end collectible spoons. Mind out of the gutter!

We’ve all been to souvenir shops and seen them, the little silver-plated teaspoons, often displayed in little clear plastic cases, selling for $5 or $10 each. Our parents or grandparents probably had a whole collection of them, maybe even displayed on a wall. But are they actually worth anything?

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Much of the collectible spoon trade in the USA is believed to date back to the 1890s, when a jeweller in Massachusetts began to create sterling silver spoons to commemorate the Salem Witch trials. It turned out that there was a market for them, so he kept banging them out until sometime around the 1920s. All told it is believed that tens of thousands were made.

Other entrepreneurial folk were watching on. They noticed that there was a buck to be made. And when there is a buck to be made, others will follow.

Profit Pants is one who likes to rip off the bandaid. So let’s do just that and break your precious heart.

Almost every single spoon you are likely to come across is worth less than $100. There we go, the painful truth, delivered quickly.

So then the question becomes, “how far below $100 are we talking?”.

That silver-plated spoon which you have purchased from the souvenir shop? It’s likely to be valued somewhere below what you paid for it. $20 or less. Possibly closer to $0. These spoons are made in bulk, were sold in retail stores to anyone who took the time to get off the tour bus, and were priced accordingly. Created as impulse-buys. Built for maximum profit.

The funny thing about collectibles and their “worth”, is that often when a large number of people think that something is “collectible”, it often doesn’t serve well for future prices. Prices of spoons in the most basic sense are following the well known supply and demand game, once you have a large number of people buying them brand new (a large supply), half of your equation is already looking a tad bleak.

Sterling silver spoons are step above silver-plated spoons. The silver itself is worth something. The fact that it is NOT silver-plated means that at some point a decision was made that the item should be somewhat premium. It was a decision to not make it as cheap as humanly possible. It was slightly better than a quick money grab.

Be glad that the bandaid was ripped off, as the news on sterling silver is also unlikely to send you laughing all the way to the bank. We’re still under $100, however the price of the silver content helps to set a floor price of $5–10 and most will sit somewhere between that floor price and $50. So don’t throw these straight into the bin, do a little research and at worst consider selling them for scrap silver value.

If you are lucky enough to have one of those several thousand Salem Witch Trial souvenir spoons, their values are still at $100 or more, so are worth keeping an eye out for.

With the Salem Witch spoons we go back to our supply and demand equation. There were thousands of those Salem spoons made, but it is a subject matter which is of interest to many people. A national event, forever written into history books. If you’re going to buy a spoon, it’s a subject which many would find interesting. Subject-matter is critical when determining spoon value.

If those same spoons were instead covering a subject matter such as the top rated beach in Massachusetts, the demand wouldn’t be there and we would chop the price down significantly. Of course, also working in the spoon’s favour here is that the Salem Witch spoons are regarded as some of the first souvenir spoons made. Old is good, first is better.

In summary, not many spoons are worth much.

For a fun little exercise, jump onto eBay. Run a search for “tea spoon” and then filter by only the sold listings (as we all know that the prices on items still for sale mean almost nothing, only that nobody has yet chosen to buy it). Then sort by the highest price. It quickly becomes apparent how few spoons are worth much at all. Granted, many of the more expensive items may be sold using auction houses rather than eBay. Although it is a humbling exercise if you have inherited your grandmother’s teaspoon collection and were in the process of typing up your resignation letter with plans to retire.

There is a market for everything though. We never truly know who is out there looking for a particular item, we never know what is driving them to look for that item either. You may have a silver-plated souvenir teaspoon purchased from a tiny town, commemorating the opening of a plain ol’ boring bridge. To the average antique collector it may be worth nothing at all, and rightly so. However, what would that same spoon be worth to someone who worked on the construction of that bridge? What about someone who was proposed to on that bridge, on that same day many years ago, their partner has since passed away and they want a keepsake?

Prices paid are not always rational. It never hurts to test the market, any market, if you have the spare time. If you hold the dice, you may as well roll em’.

To show the ceiling of what is possible, and keep a glimmer of hope alive after having ripped off that bandaid earlier; a silver table spoon made by Paul Revere Jr. (largely regarded as the best silversmith of all time) was put to the hammer by Heritage Auctions in 2021. Circa 1790, the table spoon was highly detailed and monogrammed for Hepzibah Hall (Fitch). The final selling price, a mouth-watering $32,500USD. I wanted to leave you on a high.

Here at Profit Pants I have a thirst to dig into new and diverse topics. Sometimes I don’t get the answers I was hoping for. This was one of those times.

Throughout my life I have had the understanding that teaspoons were prized collector items. I had the understanding that a lot of them were worth a lot of money.

Now I know that the vast majority have little to no value. Now I know that I, a “normal” person, could purchase one of the most expensive collector spoons in the world if I was willing to forego purchasing a new car. I’m left feeling a little disappointed.

I absolutely wanted there to be a few more 0’s involved in these prices. I absolutely wanted for the world to value collector teaspoons at the kind of prices I had been led to believe they were worth while growing up. And not because I own any, or expect to own any in the future, but because I wanted to validate my childhood memories. My memories that collector teaspoons were valuable.

But maybe, in a way, my childhood memories have been validated. Now knowing that the vast majority aren’t worth much, these vast teaspoon collections aren’t anything to do with money. It’s about remembering the places where you bought them from. It’s about valuing things highly that aren’t worth a lot of money. It’s about collecting as a passion. That makes them even more special.

Go out into the wild, find the unique things that bring you joy, buy against the herd.

It’s almost sounding like a Warren Buffett quote.

And if it is teaspoons that spark joy for you, go ahead and buy them, now wise in the fact that they are highly unlikely to ever be handed down generations with the promise that they can be sold to fund college. And wise in the fact that collecting for the sake of collecting is OK.

Happy spooning.

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