Buying Record Collections From People
DeeRock
1,836 Posts
I run various ads from time to time around town that I buy records. I got a call from a lady two weeks ago and she told me she has a huge collection and both her and her husband were dj's in the 70's. I tried to get over there the same day but she wanted to wait a day or two. So in the meantime we get this huge snow storm and I'm on house arrest until the shit melts away. I hit her up and she tells me to come on over. I get there and she has a total of 6 crates piled up on top of each other in the back of the basement in this dark fucked up ass room behind a bunch of boxes. So i suggest we change the burnt out light bulb before I go in. She brings me a bulb and I change it out. I asked where the rest of the collection was and she said that was it. i asked about the 45's she mentioned on the phone and she said if they aren't in the crates then they are gone. Well when the snow melted it flooded the basement and only 2 crates are dry. The rest are stuck together and moldy. I had to move all the crap and get to them before finding this out. She then asks me to move them all to another room because it will be easier to go through them. So I do it. They were just fine to look at after I had actually got to them, we didn't need to move them anywhere. So I dig through and it's your average Earth Wind & Fire, Rick james fodder. I'm highly disappointed. I pulled 10 titles that had survived the damage and three of those really needed some tender loving care. So I then ask how much she wants for them and she says huh? I explained they were really nothing special but I could use them. She then told me she would never ever sell the collection or any of the records in it and she knows its worth a lot of money and those records are rare and she thought I just wanted to come by and SEE them!!!!!!!!! I was ready to go through the roof. All I did was end up straightening out her fucked up ass dark basement corner room and moving the records to the room she wanted. 90% of that collection is ruined. yet she thinks they are priceless and wasted my time. Now my question is WHY THE F*ck DO NON RECORD COLLECTORS ALWAYS THINK THIS?! She really only had one record I wanted and I will find it in due time. Those records had obviously been sitting in that room for years and if someone would have went in there and just took those 10 records she would have never known or missed them yet won't sell them after calling my ad. WTF?
Comments
Did you tell her to start charging entry-fees to look at her rare collection?
All you can really do is stop yourself from cussing them out and looking like the asshole.
what the hell is this? im already scared by the ultimate granolas for christsake!
im buyin a plane ticket right now to come observe this priceless collection.
i cant wait!
This is text book common-people's-record-related-threads
but then she changed her mind for some reason.
I think it's when you freeze a bag of piss flat, in a thin frisbee like shape, and then you slip it in their mail slot or underneath their door and it melts into a puddle of piss.
nah they get a whiff of a beatles butcher going for $1000 and they think their terds are priceless
that story is classic, but I swear I get calls from people like that everyday
I even got a call recently where the seller offered to sell me 1 record, yeah he only had one record for sale.
I always knew it as a piss puck - freeze pee-pee in a petri dish, turn upside down & slide under door - voila!
Happened to me three or four times, whether it was calls, or some random person at a Goodwill (or place like that) noticing that I am looking through the records.
what record?
Luckily he didn't really know how to use eBay and I made it out of there with some goodies.
In short, and not to sound flippant: it's because they're not record collectors.
People with basement "collections" aren't thinking about supply and demand; they're often like the jamokes on Antiques Roadshow who don't know the market but sure hope that their bullshit Thomas Kincade litho from "back in the day" makes them an instant millionaire. Money for nothing; chicks for free.
There is this prevailing notion that "old things are worth money." This includes old records. The people who are the least educated on current market rates are precisely the same people who grossly misjudge (high and low) what their records are worth. Because they're not employing basic principles of logic regarding their "collections," they also aren't going to be considering other aspects of what makes a true collection valuable - rarity, popular desirability, and (holy christ almighty) the condition their records are in. We've all met folks who err by the second condition; they're the people that, because they were big into Boston in their youth, think that everyone else should feel the same way, and that selfsame impetus should drive the worldwide record market. Sorry, Charlie.
Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. Some folks are willing to sell anything - even their precious 50-year-old collection of Andy Williams and Pet Clark - when they really need money. For others, selling their old LPs is like selling part of their youth, and this factor clouds their better judgement. Most of us have been acquainted with record-sellers that tell us stories of where they were when they first heard a certain single, and then heard what little we were willing to pay for it. I've been reluctant to buy records from folks like this, because they're obviously not ready to part with vestiges of their youth.
The vast majority of kids in the 60s or 70s didn't buy records with investment potential in mind. I don't begrudge them that - most of us at one point bought at least one garbage cassingle back in the day - but that's hand-in-glove with a person who's got little in the way of a collector-friendly lot.