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Charity Shop Vinyl

Tony

I have been working for a charity for the last 6 months ( I am not saying which one because you know who will come in with some cheap piss take or youtube trailer) but believe me most stuff gets sold within three months.

The amount of money raised by shops is actually quite considerable and does a great deal of good.

Regards

Mick
 
I don't care what anyone thinks of me.

Trying to sell crappy condition vinyl for £10 is taking the p*ss, charity shop or not.

If things were priced more reasonable they would shift a lot more, hence increase the money raised for charity
 
whitezombie

The answer is simple, walk away and spend your cash somewhere else. The charity I was involved with sold LPs for around a £5 and they sold well. The old adage of sell fast and cheap does not apply to charity shops because you do not know when the next donation from a do gooder will happen.

Regards

Mick
 
No-one is against charity shops here so lets get back to the original post!

If vinyl keeps being listed high in charity shops then people wont pay and the charity loses out. If the vinyl remains high people will start searching other places like boot sales, flea bay etc and avoid the charity shop.

I have raised money for charities doing runs etc but i would rather donate with nothing in return (as is the norm) than pay for something that is not worth it like a dodgy vinyl for £10!

surely you would rather just donate £10 rather than buy overpriced vinyl for £10
(a sense of feeling ripped off would come in and you would miss the point)????
 
I think the charity shops realized one day that a lot of people were selling bad quality vinyl at absurdly inflated prices and thought "hmm, why not us? It's for a good cause after all."

I went to a second hand record fair the other day and was amazed at the lousy quality/high prices charged by people in the business. £15-20 is not uncommon for some battered, scratched-to-death copy of some old Rolling Stones or Led Zep LP. The sellers are mostly people without the fixed costs of operating a bricks-and-mortar shop, so that rationale for high prices does not hold up very well.
 
At the British Heart Foundation shop near where I live the vinyl is sensibly priced, but it always seems to be the same mix of Paul Young, The Thompson Twins, and Status Quo. Mind you, they do have a signed copy of a Wee Willie Harris LP.
 
A question of balance?

Let's say you are working in Oxfam, and in comes an Ex+ Let it Bleed with the sticker, poster, and original uncensored inner. Would you sell it for £2.00? Is it better to put it in the rack for £20 (a good price) or send it off to wherever charity shops send stuff they think might actually be worth something?

Tim
 
Let's say you are working in Oxfam, and in comes an Ex+ Let it Bleed with the sticker, poster, and original uncensored inner. Would you sell it for £2.00? Is it better to put it in the rack for £20 (a good price) or send it off to wherever charity shops send stuff they think might actually be worth something?

I have no issue at all with them marking that particular record up at £20 or more (it's certainly worth more), or listing it on eBay. My objection is when they stick a badly scratched 'boxed logo' reissue without the poster and with a torn sleeve up at that price, which is what many stores would do these days. In any collector arena it is only right to do the research prior to attaching the price sticker, anything other than that is ripping off the punter IMO. If it is wrong the buyer, who may not have the appropriate knowledge either, is deceived and may leave the shop thinking they have a collectable item when in truth they've paid good money for something that is worthless, and charity shop or not, that's not right. I'm not implying the shops are doing this maliciously, just that there is far more to this than simply owning a copy of the RCRRPG! You need to know the copy you are holding is actually the one listed in the book, and that comes from years of experience I'm afraid.

Tony.
 
I was in town on Saturday (a very rare event) so I did a trawl of the charity shops. Amongst the the Phil Collins, Neil Diamond and Abba's greatest hits I found one LP in EX condition which I bought for the princely sum of £1. I also entered a prize draw (with a cash prize which I will donate back to the charity should I win).

I was happy, the charity was happy so win-win there.

As an aside, I was watched by the young assistant (she was in her late teens) on the till while I took the LPs out to inspect them. When I went to the till to pay, she said that she collects vinyl but only new releases. She doesn't have a means of playing them though, she reckons that ruins them but she likes the sleeves and other goodies that come with limited edition vinyl releases.
 
As an aside, I was watched by the young assistant (she was in her late teens) on the till while I took the LPs out to inspect them. When I went to the till to pay, she said that she collects vinyl but only new releases. She doesn't have a means of playing them though, she reckons that ruins them but she likes the sleeves and other goodies that come with limited edition vinyl releases.

I get the impression that's quite popular these days, often a band will release a single as a download and a highly limited and desirable 7" single, some even signed or with hand-made sleeves etc. There are some really nice items out there, I've been known to buy randomly just because I like the sleeve! Some can be good investments too.

Tony.
 
Oxfam overcharging for what they perceive to be rare items (and it pretty much is Oxfam we are talking about here) is a matter of fact ... whether it's actually worth getting upset about is another matter.

On the stuff they don't perceive to be rare items - basically anything not in RCRRPG (what's that these days? anything worth less than a tenner if minty or has it gone up?) they charge less than a typical record fair - £3 or so usually in our nearest. While this is more than the other local charity shops charging £1 to £1.50 they do at least do us the favour of only stocking decent stuff. ie. you don't have to shift through ten copies of Let's have a Max Bygrave Hammond Organ Party for every potential purchase.

I would argue they are fairly good value for certain sorts of records (anything worth less than the RCRRPG minimum). Anyone who bought something rare and expensive from Oxfam would need to be pretty sure of what they are buying and get lucky. Can't say I've ever been tempted, but I don't go into a charity shop in an expecting to drop £20 or £30 on a record frame of mind

I suspect a lot of charity shops have dealers getting first dibs as it's the only thing that would explain that they only ever seem to have rubbish. The best locally to me for lucky finds is The PDSA, which seems to have a policy of putting out whatever comes in, which means if you get there at the right time and hit a good collection you can make quite a haul. Only happens once in a while though and you need to visit regularly and early.

I get the impression that's quite popular these days, often a band will release a single as a download and a highly limited and desirable 7" single, some even signed or with hand-made sleeves etc. There are some really nice items out there, I've been known to buy randomly just because I like the sleeve! Some can be good investments too.

They can be, especially in the DIY record label scenes, where runs of singles are often as little as 250 copies. I've got quite a few indiepop singles released in the past couple of years which are now worth £30 or £40 (at least if ebay sales are anything to go by) and at least one worth over £100*. No intention of selling them mind you and no knowing of those prices will sustain as the prices just reflect a rare item desirable to a band's usually relatively small (but larger than the run of singles) fanbase.

* Pains of Being Pure At Heart/Parallelograms split on Atomic Beat Records. Purchased because I know various members of the Parallelograms and the lady who runs Atomic Beat from her bedroom quite well ... oh and because it's a good record :). All of whom are quick to point out that the record isn't worth this much because of anything they did, but simply because the Pains are having a reasonable amount of success and have an obsessive US fan base who want rarities like this badly.
 
Oh come off it Mick, you're talking to people who want to give their money to charity, not people just out to spend as little as possible. We're talking about an Oxfam shop, not a donation. The Oxfam near me sells knackered copies of everything for pretty much the cost of a brand new re-issue of the record, which is probably why the stuff sits in the window for months. As it is, I'd rather give them £3 a month and buy my vinyl elsewhere, which is a shame cause finding used bargains in charity shops used to be fun, there just doesn't seem to be any bargains any more.
 
So what is the answer?

(a) the shop can put everything out cheap and therefore miss out because they sell potentially valuable albums for next to nothing.

(b) the shop can offer first dibs to 2nd hand dealers, thus ensuring that everything that goes on sale to general punters is tat. Therefore losing sales as people cease browsing.

(c) the shop can try and put a realistic market value on vinyl - and often fail because they don't have access to a "Tony".

I genuinely don't know the answer... Possibly an answer is to go with a percentage (say 33%) of the RCRRPG and this will often get a better price than (a) and give the chance of a bergain for the punters. What is inevitable is the price will often be wrong.
 
Most charity shops go for option a) or b).

Oxfam so far as I'm aware have a central clearing centre that all their donations go to to get valued (I don't know what they do with the tat) and then shipped out to their specialised record/book shops. I'd argue that if you are going to go the c) route especially if you have centralised things this way then you ought really to find yourself a Tony. It wouldn't be doable on a shop by shop basis but would with a centralised operation. If your shops have a reputation for asking over the odds for rare records (or for presenting records as rare that aren't) it's not going to attract the sort of people who buy those sort of items, however if they evaluate the rare stuff correctly you'll do well.
 
I have been very happy with lots of spoken word and classical vinyl that I have bought at extremely reasonable prices from Oxfam over the years (Most recently, The BBC/Richard Burton version of Under Milk Wood for £2 in Shaftesbury).

I wouldn't pay the prices they mark up most of their their pop/rock stuff for, but they seem to shift them from their Strutton Ground store in London, at least, so good for them.

My best ever charity shop finds were a bunch of Mercury Living Presence originals from Oxfam in Wood Green and a very good mono copy of Blonde on Blonde from the Mencap shop in Muswell Hill.
 
To be fair, the one near me does seem to have someone with some taste working there, they do have interesting stuff in now and again but it's just priced too high.
 
Most charity shops go for option a) or b).

Oxfam so far as I'm aware have a central clearing centre that all their donations go to to get valued (I don't know what they do with the tat) and then shipped out to their specialised record/book shops. I'd argue that if you are going to go the c) route especially if you have centralised things this way then you ought really to find yourself a Tony. It wouldn't be doable on a shop by shop basis but would with a centralised operation. If your shops have a reputation for asking over the odds for rare records (or for presenting records as rare that aren't) it's not going to attract the sort of people who buy those sort of items, however if they evaluate the rare stuff correctly you'll do well.

Sounds like a sensible way to give something back as it were. Go and be Oxfam's Tony.
 
Sounds like a sensible way to give something back as it were. Go and be Oxfam's Tony.

Ha, well I don't have the depth of knowledge required, I don't think their central clearing is local and I think I give them enough support by buying all the overpriced SciFi paperbacks in my local shop :).
 


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