ebay and other necessary delays

Es­ti­mated reading time is 3 min­utes.

I’VE BEEN SELLING RECORDS ON EBAY. Set­ting up and run­ning on eBay is a daunting, labor-intensive, time-consuming ob­stacle course. It’s nothing like the anec­dotes you hear on that third-rate tele­vi­sion talk-shows where people claim to be making six fig­ures an­nu­ally selling crap they find at yard sales.

The act (the art?) of col­lecting is far more com­plex than most people let on—including the afore­men­tioned yo-yos on talk shows. To col­lect re­quires knowl­edge and goals and usu­ally plans. Most people who are iden­ti­fied as col­lec­tors are usu­ally com­pul­sive ac­cu­mu­la­tors but, oh my, is that an­other con­ver­sa­tion that won’t be hap­pening today! ³

It’s 2022 and I don’t have any­thing up for sale on eBay at this time, but I didn’t want to delete this post.

Still, I hope to en­courage you, my faithful readers, to be­come record col­lec­tors. To start, you need to find your way to my eBay ads, so just click right here: my eBay store.

The title of my eBay store is Neal Umphred’s Rather Rare Records. When you open one of my ads, the top of the ad will have the generic eBay look, like this:

 

The ad above is an auc­tion for Mo­bile Fi­delity Sound Lab’s “Orig­inal Master Recording” of the Bea­tles’ Mag­ical Mys­tery Tour album. The min­imum bid is $59.99, which is the lowest price I will cur­rently ac­cept for this record. If this was a set-sale/Buy It Now ad, in­stead of ‘Starting bid’ it would read ‘Price’ with a ‘Buy It Now’ button to the right.

Scroll down until you come to the part of the ad where my in­di­vidual de­sign comes into play, which tells you more about the item for sale:

 

This screen­shot is only one-third (⅓) of the en­tire field; keep scrolling for all the per­ti­nent information.

I have about 3,000 records to sell, with only 200 cur­rently on­line. So, your next move: pick a handful of items and bid or buy and make my day . . .

 

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The image at the top of this page is the photo that I use as the Fea­tured Image on my Rather Rare Records blog. There is ramble on about records and the music en­graved in their grooves. Tor read some of those ram­blings, click here.

 

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FOOT­NOTES:

1  My daugh­ter’s mother and I had res­cued the owners of this very com­plex sev­eral times by “man­aging” the apart­ments when the hired man­agers proved too drunk to work.

2  Using 1969 (the year I took my first job after high school) as a starting point, if the same rate of RWI (real-world in­fla­tion versus the non­sense passed off by ‘of­fi­cial’ sources such as the Con­sumer Price Index, etc.) that has af­fected the prices of most of the items that we use each and every day then com­pared to now was ap­plied to the min­imum wage that was in ef­fect in ’69, then to­day’s min­imum wage would be ap­prox­i­mately $14–20 per hour.

3   To ac­cu­mu­late means to ac­quire an in­creasing number or quan­tity of some­thing. The over­whelming ma­jority of people that I have met who iden­tify them­selves as record col­lec­tors spend vast amounts of time spending small sums of money on in­creasing quan­ti­ties of used records they find at Good Will, Sal­va­tion Army, thrift shops, yard sales, flea mar­kets, etc. I try to point out to them that spending $1 apiece on a hun­dred records that you don’t want or need be­cause they were too good a buy to pass up is not the same thing as spending $100 on one record that you have been looking for ten years . . .

 

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