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Yeah, in the original video there were no advert breaks. Now there’s seven.
Over here in the UK the majority of dvds are sold by thrift shops at 5 for a £1 (about 1.25 USD). The shop I volunteer in threw out about 200 last week as they were unsaleable, and unrecycleable. There are dvds which are still worth selling though, also I don’t know what the state of the US market is.
The same with cds, plus by now the plastic in the 1990s cases is starting to degrade so many have cracks.
With books, the best stuff is proper how-to-do-it/reference books. For instance I picked up a book on how to replicate Gibson guitar finishes for £1- when I checked sellers were asking £50 for used copies. I bin hardback fiction, even if it’s intelligent.
I have to sort through about 3,000 books, dvds and cds a week at the thrift, so I have a somewhat cynical approach! There’s nothing like sorting through a pile of dvds of Hollywood crap to give you a ‘kill ’em all’ feeling 🙂
Curiosity Incorporated has 275,000 YouTube subscribers. LockPickingLawyer has 1,120,000 subscribers (I’m not one). He did start a year earlier, in 2015.
Participation. Everyone can pick up a lock to fiddle with, few have access to a hoarder’s house!
Says “I just got the keys from the locksmith”. Holds the key up so that you can clearly see the bitting, inserts that key into the lock and opens the door. Hmmm… looks like the locksmith removed the original lock and replaced it with a cheap Chinese one (no scratches on the lock, no branding).
I’ve been watching too much LockPickingLawyer 🙂
The rest of it is a horror movie involving hundreds of small rubber dolls and a claustrophobic warehouse where the heating’s still on but the lighting’s off.
According to this CBC article Mary Borgstrom’s children were going to bulldoze her house with all the contents still inside. I thought that was a bit extreme until I read further down the article about how Archbold had to remove 25 tonnes of trash from the place.
Re those stamps.com scales. I had a Salters electronic scale that I scavenged out of a box of junk at a flea market. Worked alright for a while but then started consistently reading high, so I stripped it down to see if there was anything I could fix. Turns out the mechanism is an aluminium bar attached at one end to the top plate and at the other to the base. Attached to it is a fine grid of wires; as the bar distorts due to weight the grid flexes and its electrical resistance changes, and this change is converted to a reading. So once it goes wrong it’s probably unfixable. There’s a Wikipedia article on the grid- can’t remember the name, but there are high-end versions.
The simple construction means that they’re pretty cheap- I picked up a replacement at Lidl for 5 GBP. They’re accurate ‘cos I checked mine with a set of Post Office weights
12/04/2019 at 9:26 am in reply to: Can anyone tell me anything about this CBS Japan Simon and Garfunkel Cassette ? #7134978 rpm? I used to listen to Leonard Cohen at 78- it put a positive spin on his maunderings.
There is a Japanese vendor on Australian eBay selling Japanese tapes, including a CBS S&G one- think it was priced at 48 AUD, but was a studio one.
Worth checking these cassettes- I rescued a pile from a bin, and one turned out to be an obscure BBC live recording from an even obscurer band, not listed in their discography.
I suppose the “crux of the matter” is- who are you writing for when you write feedback? Seems to me to be a combination of patting the customer on the back for buying and paying promptly, and giving a warm fuzzy feeling to any prospective customers that you’re a really nice eBayer to deal with.
Or maybe not… I suspect that a certain percentage of customers are male, and would be a bit uncomfortable with a warm fuzzy feeling. “Ta for the really fast payment- YOU’RE A REAL DARLING!!! I hope the grommet is a really snug fit in your pumping thing!!!”
It’s not a good idea to reply to negative feedback with a reply that can be interpreted as even slightly hostile by the next customer.
Lie pleasantly- “Have reached out to buyer and offered a complete refund plus an extra 25% compensation for the annoyance. We were sorry we did not check that the item when purchased from a police auction had in fact been seized from an illegal kipper factory, hence the subtle aroma of hickory smoke.”
What’s the buyer going to do? Ask for their cash dividend? They’ve already left the negative feedback.
Yes- found a beer mat from a local brewery in a university bar. Kept it for years and then listed it on eBay as an auction starting at 99 pence, back in 2002. A few days later I checked, and it had been bid up to £99. One of the bidders contacted me and told me that it was a rare pre-war mat, and he expected it to go for considerably more. Sold for £220! I sometimes wonder what happened to that mat…
Of course there’s always the things that go in the other direction pricewise 🙂 Oil painting of an Edwardian lady, bought for £300 at a live auction ‘cos it looked like a John Lavery , sold at a live auction for £40… it wasn’t.
Two or three years back a Leicester eBayer got prosecuted for running his business using (cough) “pre-loved” stamps. I think he purchased bulk lots of stamps on part covers, and sorted through them for the ones that missed being cancelled. The glue’s some kind of synthetic stuff (used to be gum arabic) which can be softened with solvents. Not sure how he got detected- the glue does get weakened so it might be that the stamps dropped off in the sorting machines.
I did offer free postage on all listings, but now I just work on a rough four-band costing (letter, large letter, small and medium parcel) and charge at cost- which of course I have to pay eBay and PayPal fees on. Reason being that I was getting offers on low-value stuff which I’d be happy to accept except that they’d be below the cost of shipping.
Last sale was a match striker to a US customer- cost of striker £10, cost of shipping via GSP to the customer approximately £20 of which £2.90 was for me posting it to the GSP hub. Not sure how much of that £20 was customs fees. I have some objection to people getting charged customs on old stuff- I was advised by Royal Mail staff not to declare the value on the CN22 label because of possible theft and “they’re not interested in the odd parcel”. Problem with GSP is that these fees can’t be avoided, and sometimes they’re exorbitant (Australia).
(promotional letter sent to a certain big-eared royal person)
To Mr H.R.H. Prince, Charles Buckingham Palace, London
Dear Mr. Prince
Imagine the looks of surprise that Mrs. Prince and the Prince family will have on their faces when you draw up outside the front door of Charles Buckingham Palace in a brand new Smart Car!
I think it might be one of the Japanese deities- something like Daikoku, the god of farmers.
Here in the UK there’s the University of the Third Age (U3A)- a friend is a member and takes part in regular weekly walks, there’s talks by scholars, and also informal groups who take part in various activities. She’s a member of “How hard can it be?” who do various things like roller skating, abseiling, canoeing (these are pensioners doing these activities for the first time!)
Within two minutes walk from my house are at least 6 mosques, 4 churches, a synagogue and a Hare Krishna setup. I have to go a bit further for the Quaker, Buddhist, Jain and Hindu meeting places (between 10 and 30 minutes walk). The atheists meet in a pub downtown.
Unfortunately I worship the god Źdźbło, and the nearest (and only) temple is on Rockall.
“We have a Code 88”? Infestation of Nazis in the Goodwill?
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