From baseball cards to cereal boxes, yesterday’s trash has become today’s treasure. Seemingly worthless items can be worth surprising sums. Take cereal boxes, for example. A 1935 Wheaties box, featuring baseball legend Lou Gehrig, sold for $7,680 at an auction in 2019, after being estimated to be worth $1,000 to $2,000. Worth even more are the pop culture icon cereal boxes, such as the Betty White Wheaties box that sold for $10,240 in 2022. A Kellogg’s Super Mario Brothers cereal box sold on eBay for $45,000 in 2018. It’s not just cereal boxes that are hidden treasures. Old casino chips are worth a fortune as well. A $5 chip from The Sands in Las Vegas sold on eBay in 2018 for $8,101, while a $1,000 token from Frontier Casino sold for $35,000 in January. An assorted set of 7 poker chips, ranging from 50¢ to $5 from The Sahara went for $8,700 in 2021. You could be sitting on a gold mine if you have a stack of VHS types of valuable childhood movies. If you could travel back to 1985 and tell yourself not to open your copy of Back to the Future, you could sell it today for a cool $1,000. The Fast and the Furious, which came out in the early 2000s, will bring you a cool $1,000 if you have it in VHS form. Do you remember the Michael J. Fox film Teen Wolf? If you happen to have it on VHS, it could bring in $1,190 on eBay. Americans fell in love with the furry little menaces in Gremlins in 1980. Today, a VHS copy of it goes for $1,250. Needless to say bubblegum baseball cards fetch quite a sum these days, especially if they come in sets. In 2010, a set of 24 sold for $17,625 at an auction. Last, but not least, if you happen to have a disposable sleeveless a-line paper dress bearing the Campbell’s Soup can logo, don’t go near a fire. Those dresses can command $4,000 to $6,600 each.
