Most valuable acl soda bottle in your area

[iggyworf]

Very nice bottle!

 

[M.C.Glass]

Thanks Iggy.
For the record, I don't have a Circus bottle, but I do have a Deacon Jones.
I bid on a Circus last fall, but the price skyrocketed late, and I was short.

 

[jblaylock]

I don't have a lot of information, nor is this my bottle (pulled from ebay) but when they show up online, they typically have a higher price tag. This $75 is one of the cheaper ones I've seen.

Fulton KY

 

[SODAPOPBOB]

Scenario / Pop Quiz

You live in the Midwest and are driving cross-country to California to visit relatives and take your family to Disneyland. Your route takes you through Twin Falls, Idaho where you plan to stay a single night at a Motel-6. You check into your room around 3M and while the wife and kids check out the swimming pool you have just enough time to check out a couple of antique shops that you saw as you drove into town. The second shop you visit has a modest display of acl soda bottles and among them you spot a near mint Deacon Jones priced at $35.00. You're familiar with the bottle and know its a steal at that price, so you nab it and keep looking. Most of the bottles are national brands that you are not too interested in, plus a few others you have never heard of. One of them is an A-1 from Medford, Oregon that has a band majorette on the label and is priced at $15.00. But because you never heard of it and aren't interested in bottles from Oregon, you place it back on the shelf and then pay for your $35.00 Deacon Jones bottle and leave the store a happy camper.

But little did you know that the A-1 bottle consistently sells on eBay between $500 and $1,000. Had you bought it and resold it on eBay for $1,000, you could just about have paid for your entire cross-country trip to Disneyland. But how is a collector to know the value of every soda bottle, especially those they are not familiar with?

A-1 Medford, Oregon

Four examples on WorthPoint between 2012 and 2014 - ranging in price from $513 at the lowest to $1,200 at the highest.

 

[SODAPOPBOB]

P.S.

I specifically selected the A-1 bottle for my scenario because it is not listed in Rick Sweeney's ACL book - so even if you took such a guide along with you wherever you go, it won't always be of help. Which raises the question again, how do we recognize those so called "sleeper" bottles when we see them?

 

[iggyworf]

We have to be nice to each other and spread our knowledge. Thanx Bob & everybody else!

 

[SODAPOPBOB]

Iggy

Thanks - I agree!

With today's technology available to us, the best thing I can think of to help identify those "sleeper" bottles when we see them is twofold ...

1. Take a laptop computer along wherever you go - especially when traveling outside your local area

2. Pay $20 for a month's subscription on WorthPoint - so if you do come across a bottle you're not familiar with but suspect might be a sleeper, immediately check out its past sales record and see if you might have found the deal of the century.

 

[RIBottleguy]

Here in RI we have a lot of rare ACL sodas, but luckily most of them are quite affordable. The highest price I have ever seen was for a Dexter Beverages from Central Falls, RI. It went for a little over $200. Shiloh Club (Indian) is probably next in line, and if one ever comes up for sale, a Seacrest Beverages (lighthouse) or Echo Spring (mountaineer) might bring a lot.

 

[Dr Pepper bottle man]

8 3/4" tall clear glass machine made ACL crown top soda bottle. PORT BOTTLING WORKS GOOSE CREEK, TEXAS with picture of ship in red & white on front label, PORT BEVERAGES on shoulders, ... PORT BOTTLING WORKS GOOSE CREEK, TEXAS on back. The town of Goose Creek no longer exists, it became part of Baytown, Texas in 1948, so this bottle predates that.
There are 2 different sizes.

Note: there is a bottle from Beaumont. Texas from Uneeda Bottling that has the same ship logo. They must have bought out Port Bottling Works Co. I guess

 

[SODAPOPBOB]

RIB

Thanks for sharing - However, you just shot a couple of holes in my "take a laptop along" suggestion because not one of the Rhode Island bottles you mentioned is listed on WorthPoint. In fact, I can't find pictures of any of them anywhere on the Internet, so they must be super hard to come by like you said. Of course, many bottles are listed on WorthPoint, which has given me an idea as to how we might be able to determine the current value of certain acl bottles. The only bummer is, in order to make this idea work I would have to look up every one of the 1,200 bottles shown in Rick Sweeney's ACL book, and for those I can find on WorthPoint to list some type of approximate, current value. After that I would have to scan all 48 picture-pages of the book and then one by one insert the approximate values below each of the pictures. I already know that Rick Sweeney won't have a problem with this because a few years ago I mentioned to him the possibility of my doing something along these lines and he said it was okay with him because the book is out of print and outdated anyway, and for me to do anything I wanted because he was totally done with the book and there are never going to be anymore reprints made. But can you imagine how long it would take me to do the necessary work involving 1,200 different acl bottles? Hmmm, as much as I would like to help everyone out and accomplish this project, I really need to think about it for awhile and decide if its something that I really want to try and tackle.