Best Offer
The struggle to leave a deal alone
I was getting ready to go to the store to pick up the last few things for dinner when Facebook showed me a Marketplace notification. Fifty random CDs. Ten bucks. Listed three minutes ago.
It’s like my Bat signal. I enlarged the photo. There’s a Harry Chapin CD. His deep catalog stuff is out of print and goes for a little more than the usual. There’s at least a dozen Christmas CDs, definitely don’t need those. A couple Beatles, some less common smooth jazz, a few indie label compilations I can’t place.
I sighed, messaged the dude. Are you at least along my route to the store? Nope. Fifteen minutes out of the way. I sighed again. Lemme grab these groceries and I’ll be there.
Quitting is hard.
I still haven’t unloaded the seven boxes of stuff I talked about in Saturday’s post. There’s easily over 1000 CDs there to sort and price. I have to come up with a whole new area to stash this stuff in, so I can keep accurate track of what sells when. To top it off, I have this TI 99/4A collection I bought on the same trip. Great deal, a few rare titles on cassette, and enough accessories and cartridges that I’ll easily double my money and then some after taking out the stuff I wanna keep.
(You wanna talk about junkman luck? I have a tape game called Bomb Squad, from 1981. The game’s available to download online but my OG tape is bad and won’t load. I just re-tested it last week to confirm this. Two days later, this lot pops up, with a copy of Bomb Squad. The tape games are not common at all – I’d have never expected to find one “in the wild” this far into the game.)
I got to the guy’s house, checked the discs, they looked fine. He seemed amused that someone was taking them off his hands 40 minutes after he put up the listing. I got them home, threw the first ten on Discogs (combined gross retail value over $50) and resolved to put the rest away till I’d finished some other chores.
Then I noticed a compilation in a cardboard sleeve. It’s a hip-hop CD from 2021, from a now-defunct independent rap label, a promotional disc with 21 tracks. The name of the company returns a whopping seven Google searches total. The CD is nowhere to be seen on Amazon or eBay. A Youtube channel exists, last updated years ago, with less than 200 subscribers.
I feel like I just plucked a nugget of gold out of a sluice pan of mud. Things like this are catnip to obsessive overseas collectors. There’s a guy in Japan who routinely pays $150-200 for stuff I’ve never heard of, and his only criteria seems to be just that. The more obscure and unheralded an artist is, the more likely some Japanese or German guy with disposable income is gonna lose their mind when they see it pop up.
This will definitely make up for the pile of 10,000 Maniacs and Wilson Phillips CDs I also acquired in this box. It’ll be a fish story for sure, if it sells, and me buying that box kept that guy from deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle and throwing the whole thing in the trash. And I learned about yet another startup label that came and went, and the artists who shot some real hopeful videos in parking garages in front of rented luxury cars before the dream died.
It's a conundrum, because I genuinely do want less stuff in my life. I want more time to do creative things without feeling like I’m neglecting a teetering pile of merch in the corner of my eye. I’d like to be more organized and I can’t get that way while I keep shoveling crap into the building. But I can’t get the Brickstyle Mafia CD or the leatherette TI 99/4A dust cover or the Bomb Squad tape if I stop.
I’ll figure out the balance. Eventually. Right now I have friends to feed, Atari games to play, and then I can gear up for a week of hopefully slingshotting some of this cool stuff right back out the door to its forever home. Or at least its “till the next guy puts it on Marketplace” condo.
Roll on, Junkman. Roll on. We need the storiez and the storiez need you too!
I second Matt