Have a Nice Day
Record show recaps and more compilation mania
So at the last possible minute, I decided I would put together two boxes of compilations, like I talked about in Friday’s dispatch, but I did it that day, when I was supposed to be driving to Bloomington and checking into my hotel at a decent hour. I got the boxes together, fashioned makeshift bin dividers out of index cards, swapped out broken jewel cases, and started pricing titles.
I took our little Chromebook with me, thinking if things were slow, I could price the rest while I sat at the show. Or who knows, I could drag a box inside after I got to the hotel, and work on it before bed! I got about a quarter of them priced here at home, hit the road, and rolled in around 11:30 to a place just far enough away from Bloomington to not be an extra $150 a night for the privilege of sleeping in a college town on a weekend.
Of course, I got there, set up, fired up the Chromebook, and then I saw the line of customers forming at the door and realized this plan just wasn’t gonna work. Not a bad problem to have! Unlike other shows, Bloomington doesn’t do “early bird” entry, so the first wave of customers is a full-on onslaught, not a trickle. And these people were ready to dig in.
It was a top five all-time show for me, for sure, and it was hella fun. I didn’t have space for all the stuff I brought, so I set the two boxes of comps on my dolly, next to the tables, and hoped for the best. Sure enough, one guy immediately was enraptured by them. “Are these for sale? Their price stickers are blank.”
In the moment, I punted.
See, most compilations aren’t worth much – you look on Discogs, you can find them for three or four bucks. A few notable collections, usually ones with songs unavailable elsewhere on CD, go for big money, though. And in the case of some long-running series, like Rhino’s Have a Nice Day: Super Hits of the ‘70s, the last few titles saw a much more limited release than the first, so completists have driven the price of those volumes through the roof.
In that series, volumes 23-25 are currently sitting on Discogs for $30 or more each, while the first few are worth five or six dollars. Many of the other one-off “super hits of the 60s” type collections are selling for around $1.99. So when he asked, I figured I’d play the law of averages, and I just said that anything with a blank sticker was five dollars.
It paid off – that guy made a nice stack, then checked out the rest of the table, and wound up spending $90 on an array of things. No sooner had he checked out than another guy started digging in the comps, and he made a beeline for the Have a Nice Day set. He didn’t buy any, but said his friend was interested, and he might be back. (He then dropped $100 on other stuff. I told you it was a crazy good day.)
It had just started slowing down toward the end and I was thinking about pricing some of the remaining comps before we packed up, when still another guy zeroed in on the boxes. This dude knew damn well what he was looking for, and what they were selling for elsewhere. When I told him the blank sticker CDs were $5, he held up volumes 23-25. “Even these?”
He bought just those three, and he’s probably still aglow at how he got one over on me. And he did, even though I was fully aware and chose not to acknowledge it. For one thing, I paid almost nothing per disc for those comps. For another, the boxes worked better than my most optimistic hopes and juiced my sales at what was already a great show. Sometimes you gotta let someone get a win.
Just before I started slapping lids on boxes, guy #2 showed back up unexpectedly. “Oh, someone got those last three?”
“Yeah, like fifteen minutes ago.”
He texted his friend, then fished a fifty out of his wallet. “He said he still wants the most recent ten that are left.”
Besides all the hot comp action, I had the pleasure of meeting all kinds of delightful folks. One older couple who said they’d just combined households found a bluegrass mandolin instructional VHS tape in a box I don’t always bring, and it was the funniest thing the woman had ever seen. “I’ve bought him two mandolins, and he hasn’t learned to play them, and I’m getting tired of looking at them!” she cackled, as he rolled his eyes. She bought the tape, an item I’d have guessed would probably be on the table at my estate sale.
Between them, the teenagers buying Ray Charles and Enrico Caruso (!) CDs, the couple on an awkward date divvying out their two stacks of ten (“we’ll ring them up separately,” she said, and he died a little inside), and the guy proudly loading up on jazz and blues records while pointing to his kids and telling every dealer that they were great musicians, it was another one of those days that reminds me that, in certain carefully curated conditions when the sun is just right in the sky, I actually don’t hate people in general. Disconcerting!
After squaring up the sales logs and money today, I took the vanload of record show stuff out to the warehouse. When we’re done, it’ll all be displayed on tables up front, so I can restock the boxes as new arrivals come in, and easily load out on show days. For now, though, I just piled everything in the back, to be out of Shelf Guy’s way. It’s a few weeks till the next event, and by then I’ll have time to sort and refill the crates.
Seeing that vanload of stuff, which seems like so much when I’m loading into a venue at 7:30am, barely make a dent in my new workspace, filled me with a weirdly excited vibe. Obviously, it’s not gonna take that long to fill that space up with all the inventory sitting here in our house, but this first vanload really put into perspective just what a change this is gonna be to how I do things, and what I can accomplish.
Since I went back on my word not to write about record biz stuff today, I’ll at least share this fun bit to close, and promise to try to talk about something else Wednesday.
A while back, I bought a pile of CDs and LPs from a random Marketplace guy that had some thoroughly damaged stuff, including a copy of Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son that looked like someone dragged it on asphalt. I threw it in the CD player just to see how far it’d get without skipping, and remarkably, it played without a hitch.
That particular edition was selling for over $15, so I listed mine in G+ condition for $7 and wrote:
You will swear out loud when you see how scuffed this CD is! I did! But I play tested it 9-1-2025 in our office stereo and it plays with no issues at all. Case replaced, inserts look good, CD works but looks like it went ten rounds in a London alley with Eddie and survived!
It sold today, and the buyer responded:
I’m willing to take my chances. I need this copy. If it’s good enough for Eddie it’s good enough for me. Thank you. Up the Irons! 🤘
Up the irons indeed!
“we’ll ring them up separately,” she said, and he died a little inside
Worth the price of admission right there. And honestly, don't apologize for writing about the record stuff. It's good reading.
"Sometimes you gotta let someone get a win." ...a win refills the tank, and they'll talk about that for weeks.