During the convention this year I went to the Aladin for dinner and played a little blackjack. The dealer there made an interesting point. He had a very complete set of Hard Rock until the $25 Hagar came out. He said he can't afford to pay that kind of money for the quarter chips and made a decision to just collect the $5's. He is selling off his $25's. His point is that if the chips are so expensive that you can't afford to get all of them, there is no point in having a partial set. Thus demand for the $25's just went down by 1 collector. That caused me to consider the same. I decided to hang in there and continue to collect the $25's, but realized that is a real risk that demand will be reduced as more and more collectors realize that completing sets is cost prohibitive.

Having just purchased 2 of the $25 Hagars for an arm and a leg, I fully expect them to decline rapidly in value. However, I'm interested in what other, more experienced collectors think will happen to the price for the Hagar. I can see a significant number of them never seeing the light of day because the high-rollers are not going to be interested in auctioning on e-bay.

I also thinks it's an interesting thing that HR does on the LE's. It's a real benefit to employees. They provide their employees the opportunity to purchase a chip for $25 and sell it for $1500. There are no FICA taxes on the gain, no workman's compensation cost, the gain is not reported to the IRS and whether or not it is actually taxed is dependent on the integrity of the employee. Neat fringe benefit.