EBay, Collectors, Flea Market & Antiques

They want us to sell to them at wholesale prices so they can flip on eBay, but they want us to pay them close to retail prices for the stuff they want to sell to us. Of course, in neither case do they have the overhead of a brick and mortar store to consider, which has to be built into the price.

Fortunately it's not always like this, but more often than I care to see. We have a "no haggling" policy that upsets some people because they think it's part of the experience. We just try to keep our prices low so that we, and our employees, don't have to deal with it. I tell them prices are "pre-negotiated".

And on the other end, you have people who look stuff up on eBay but they have no idea how to do it right. They don't know how to look at completed/sold items. They don't do apples to apples comparisons.

For example, I had a young couple in thinking that their Michael Jackson album was worth $200 and a Beatles Sgt Pepper LP was worth $300. What they did was see a colored vinyl pressing from Venezuela being sold for $200 and an original mono UK Sgt Pepper LP going for $300. I told them their regular old Michael Jackson Thriller LP was worth $5-10 tops and their 4th pressing Sgt Pepper was maybe $10-15 retail. I offered them a nice price for their collection but they didn't bite, because they already had faulty info in their brains that they couldn't get past. They probably thought I was trying to rip them off.

Aye yi yi.