An Open Letter to Salvation Army, Goodwill, et al
Dear Organizations:
You are not a collectables shop. Your stuff isn't that valuable. Please don't pretend it is, especially when it comes to vinyl records.
If you have a generic price for old records, fine. State it and I'll decide whether it's worth paying X dollars for some piece of crap album you've had kicking around for a couple years. But don't mark up certain albums because some Aspergers case working at your shop thinks they may be valuable.
They're not.
No, really. Not valuable.
If they were, they sure as hell wouldn't have been dumped on your doorstep. People who know what vinyl is worth, and in what condition it's worth most, do not let stuff like that go easily. If it wasn't worth their time to put it up on eBay, you're not going to get a better-than-average price for it. And I know what happens, too, I see the old stickers from hip record stores, I know they're dumping unsellable stock on you, not valuable treasures. Do not kid yourselves.
Do not insult my intelligence by saying it's "rare" or an "import", either. So's the bird flu, and that's not valuable. You can't fool me with fast talk, and I know you don't believe it either, because you rack the albums with all the rest of them, all the coverless scratched-to-Hell Streisand albums and the cracked or broken Swiss Folk Songs records and the 3 cubic yards of Christmas albums that get handed to teething babies or plucked down by screechy sticky-fingered brats. If you can't be bothered to preserve these things in better condition than you keep your godawful Slim Whitman albums, then I say you have no right to expect me to pay one cent more for these albums than any of the others. Your employees and customers both, with the exception of that one mental case doing the pricing, have zero respect for vinyl as a sound recording medium, and it is an insult to me to assert that anything on those loose metal shelves, stuffed in cardboard boxes or ratty plastic bins, has any more intrinisic value than the packing material that surrounds it.
You do good work, you provide jobs to many who would be unemployable - let's not spoil it by trying to become some sort of scam artists, hmmm?
Really.
You are not a collectables shop. Your stuff isn't that valuable. Please don't pretend it is, especially when it comes to vinyl records.
If you have a generic price for old records, fine. State it and I'll decide whether it's worth paying X dollars for some piece of crap album you've had kicking around for a couple years. But don't mark up certain albums because some Aspergers case working at your shop thinks they may be valuable.
They're not.
No, really. Not valuable.
If they were, they sure as hell wouldn't have been dumped on your doorstep. People who know what vinyl is worth, and in what condition it's worth most, do not let stuff like that go easily. If it wasn't worth their time to put it up on eBay, you're not going to get a better-than-average price for it. And I know what happens, too, I see the old stickers from hip record stores, I know they're dumping unsellable stock on you, not valuable treasures. Do not kid yourselves.
Do not insult my intelligence by saying it's "rare" or an "import", either. So's the bird flu, and that's not valuable. You can't fool me with fast talk, and I know you don't believe it either, because you rack the albums with all the rest of them, all the coverless scratched-to-Hell Streisand albums and the cracked or broken Swiss Folk Songs records and the 3 cubic yards of Christmas albums that get handed to teething babies or plucked down by screechy sticky-fingered brats. If you can't be bothered to preserve these things in better condition than you keep your godawful Slim Whitman albums, then I say you have no right to expect me to pay one cent more for these albums than any of the others. Your employees and customers both, with the exception of that one mental case doing the pricing, have zero respect for vinyl as a sound recording medium, and it is an insult to me to assert that anything on those loose metal shelves, stuffed in cardboard boxes or ratty plastic bins, has any more intrinisic value than the packing material that surrounds it.
You do good work, you provide jobs to many who would be unemployable - let's not spoil it by trying to become some sort of scam artists, hmmm?
Really.