Every generation collects something, but the specific objects change dramatically from decade to decade. Boomers built entire hobbies, display systems, and sometimes serious financial hopes around collections that made complete sense within their own cultural moment.

Gen Z, inheriting or encountering these collections now, often has genuine trouble figuring out what to even do with them — keep, sell, donate, or simply admire from a respectful distance. Here are nine of the most common.

1. Beanie Babies Kept ‘Mint With Tags’

Small beanbag plush animals, purchased in bulk and carefully preserved with their original tags attached, were treated by a lot of collectors in the 1990s as genuine investment pieces expected to appreciate significantly over time. As TheStreet has documented regarding collectible crazes of this kind, the resale market for most of these items has cooled dramatically since its peak. Gen Z, encountering a bin of preserved plush toys, tends to see sentimental clutter rather than the investment they were marketed as.

2. Precious Moments and Similar Porcelain Figurines

Teardrop-eyed porcelain children, produced in enormous variety and collected piece by piece over years, occupied dedicated display shelves in countless homes, each figurine tied to a specific life event, holiday, or milestone. Gen Z tends to appreciate the sentiment behind an individual piece while feeling genuinely unsure what to do with dozens of them at once, especially given how little secondary-market value most of these figurines have retained.

3. National Park Pin and Patch Collections

A cork board or scarf covered in embroidered patches and enamel pins from every national park visited over decades represents a genuinely impressive amount of travel and a real tradition within outdoor and RV communities. Gen Z, who tend to document travel through photos rather than physical souvenirs, generally finds the collection charming as a family history artifact but isn’t inclined to continue adding to it themselves.

4. Boxes of Vintage Postcards

Collected from personal trips or received from traveling friends and family, stacks of postcards spanning decades represent a genuinely rich, tactile record of travel before digital photography existed. Gen Z tends to find sorting through a shoebox of postcards genuinely interesting as a one-time activity, but rarely has a clear plan for what to do with the physical collection afterward beyond photographing a few favorites and setting the rest aside.

5. Political Campaign Buttons and Pins

Buttons from decades of political campaigns, collected either out of genuine civic enthusiasm or simple habit, represent a specific kind of American memorabilia with real niche collector interest. Without that same context or personal connection to the specific campaigns represented, Gen Z tends to view a box of old campaign buttons as historically interesting in the abstract but not something they’d want cluttering a shelf.

6. Vintage Avon Perfume Bottles

Novelty perfume bottles shaped like cars, animals, or seasonal objects, sold door-to-door for decades, were genuinely popular collector items, often displayed together on a shelf or in a cabinet. The bottles themselves are frequently still fragrant and hold real nostalgic value for the person who collected them. Gen Z, without that direct memory attached, tends to see an interesting vintage curiosity rather than something worth actively collecting or displaying themselves.

7. Salt and Pepper Shaker Sets

Novelty shaker pairs, shaped like everything from fruit to cartoon characters to national landmarks, were an extremely popular, affordable collecting category for decades, often acquired one set at a time from vacations or gift shops. A cabinet holding dozens of these sets represents real dedication. Gen Z generally finds a handful of favorites genuinely charming but doesn’t see the appeal of maintaining an entire large collection on permanent display.

8. Matchbook Collections From Restaurants and Hotels

Small branded matchbooks, picked up from restaurants, hotels, and bars over years of travel and dining out, once served as both a functional souvenir and a small piece of a place’s branding. With matchbooks largely phased out as a marketing giveaway, the collection reads to Gen Z as a genuinely interesting historical artifact of hospitality branding rather than something with any ongoing collecting appeal.

9. A Full Cabinet of Vintage Tupperware

Sets of vintage Tupperware in period-specific colors, some pieces decades old and still in regular use, represent both a genuine collecting interest and a testament to the brand’s durability. Gen Z tends to actually appreciate well-made vintage Tupperware for practical daily use rather than display, making this one of the rare items on this list they’re more likely to put to work in their own kitchen than pack away entirely.