Just found, question on value

[Marc26]

Hello all,
I enjoy reading the various posts here. I was in the basement of an old pharmacy recently and found the Vapo Cresaline bottle, with box and paperwork. As you can see the bottle is full, never opened. The bottle is the same as some I have seen on eBay and those have "but it now" prices form $40 to about $80. That seems overpriced to me and because the patent date is 1894 or so. Do any of you have an idea of a realistic value for the three items in the picture? I'm not looking to sell it, but just to have an approximate value for my collection notes. Thanks much for any and all help.

 

[RCO]

not familiar with this specific item , but agree a lot of ebay or online prices are inflated . often items sit online for months and never sell .
some might of even been up longer , asking prices online aren't always accurate but might give a general idea as to value

 

[CanadianBottles]

I think labeled Vapo-Cresolines are fairly common. Probably not worth that much, if they're sitting up on Ebay for $40-80 then you know the real value is somewhere below that since those ones aren't selling. I'd guess that value is somewhere around the $20 range.

 

[K6TIM]

not familiar with this specific item , but agree a lot of ebay or online prices are inflated . often items sit online for months and never sell .
some might of even been up longer , asking prices online aren't always accurate but might give a general idea as to value

Paper labeled bottles with box in this condition bring higher price than others.the price statrs a $25 up as a norm! K6TIM

 

[nhpharm]

Believe it or not, but that particular bottle dates to the 1940's or thereabouts. It is considered a poison, but they are pretty common. A complete example like this with box and papers is probably worth (as noted above) somewhere in the $25-$35 range.

 

[Marc26]

Thank you all for your answers. I figured it was from about the 40s based on the other things near it.

 

[YAKCHIK]

Speaking of pharmacies, I was gifted a box of stuff from an old pharmacy years ago. Would be interested in knowing if anyone has a idea of their age. I am new here, didn't realize I was a bottle collector until I started looking around the house.

 

[glassdigger50]

I agree $25 to $35, maybe $40 to $45 if someone wants one with the label, box and pamphlet.

 

[hemihampton]

Me & my buddy's have dug lots of those, with out box or label maybe worth $1.00. Common. LEON.

 

[capackrat]

Hello all,
I enjoy reading the various posts here. I was in the basement of an old pharmacy recently and found the Vapo Cresaline bottle, with box and paperwork. As you can see the bottle is full, never opened. The bottle is the same as some I have seen on eBay and those have "but it now" prices form $40 to about $80. That seems overpriced to me and because the patent date is 1894 or so. Do any of you have an idea of a realistic value for the three items in the picture? I'm not looking to sell it, but just to have an approximate value for my collection notes. Thanks much for any and all help.

Everyone has done a good job to try and reply to your "realistic value" question.

I too will try and help you price your item and follow-up with some research.

Firstly value and pricing are different terminology and I assume you are actually looking for a "realistic pricing" of your item since for example "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".

I only took Economics 101 but to the best of my knowledge and belief "the price elasticity of supply of collectible bottles is inelastic because the discovery of one might prompt the discovery of more. Because most collectible bottles can no longer be reproduced, its quantity supplied either does not rise or rise only slightly as the price goes up. One of a kind bottless are perfectly inelastic."

In layman's terms what this means is, if this item is rare then you can ask and get almost any price for it depending on demand, supply, bottle condition, and market conditions.

On one of the former issues, the supply for general medicinal bottles is very high since people got sick more years ago and there were more doctors (and quacks) very willing to sell them some medicine. Pepsi Cola was invented originally as a 'medicine' along with many other 'sodas' in a drug store for example.

On the latter issue, eBay 'auctions' are a near perfect capitalist market place in that the pricing will be determined by the bidders hence they should be used to determine bottle price values.

eBay 'buy it now' is an imperfect market place and should only be used in conjunction with eBay 'auctions' to determine prices of cellectible items. In other word 'buy it now' is a 'subjective' market and 'auctions' are an 'objective' market.

eBay (deliberately) does not allow access to sufficent history of their auction sales data to accurately price bottles. eBay sells this data to third parties so that the third parties can sell the data to us. In fact most aution houses sell their data because they know it sets pricing vaues. One example of an auction collation website is Worhtpoint which collates all the eBay auction sales data and sells subscriptions.

In summary, to accurately price your bottles you need to use a number of tools (especially blogs like this one) but the eBay and non-eBay auction prices are what truly dictate the final value.

I hope this helps and isn't to 'text booky' and please note that next I will research your bottle and get back to you upon completion with my best guestimate 'range' and how I derived the number.

Thanks,

Andy