How does the market for luxury items (watches, hand bags etc.) work?

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Most people I know of who buy luxury watches or handbags say they’re a good store of value and can fetch a high resale price in the future. If the market mostly consists of people who buy them for the sole purpose of reselling, wouldn’t that make it a purely speculatively priced item, akin to crypto? How has the luxury market not collapsed?

In: Economics

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I don’t think *most* people buy them to resell. They may hold their value fairly well, but I don’t think it’s common to resell them for *more* than what was paid. If they are, it’s a small quantity being resold to a small # of buyers who will pay a lot for a discontinued bag – not selling to other speculators. That’s kind of a guess, it honestly sounds more like a rationalization people tell themselves to justify such a large luxury purchase.

In any case, purely speculative markets exist all over the place, and can last quite a long time before/between crashes.

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