Today was a crap donations day.
The nadir was a bag of old telephone books and Ikea catalogs:
Not as bad but hardly stellar was 4 grocery bags of pop thrillers--the usual James Patterson, Patricia Cornwall, Tom Clancy, et al.
We get a million of these.
I price them at 49-cents each, hard- or paperback, and even at that, they don't fly off the shelves.
I decided to offload all four bags on a volunteer who'd asked me for books for her church's spring rummage sale.
I barely bothered to look through all the books, but . . . What's this?
One of these things is not like the others:
A first U.S. ed. (though not first printing) of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar?
How did that end up among these modern bestsellers?
This edition sells for $20 and up.
I priced it $35 and put it in our glass case.
I've been trying to hit a balance where cool things are within reach of people who want to own them, and are also expensive enough to put off the people who buy to resell.
I used to shop at thrift stores to resell on ebay, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to re-sellers, but I'd rather the store get the money because we use it to fund our food bank and other programs that help a lot of people fulfill basic needs--things I care about.
Also the store is something of a community resource---there really are a lot of regulars, and I want to keep that lively.
It's taken me a while to decide what to do about resellers.
I finally figured that since they're a fact of life, it's the job of thrift stores (me) to know the merchandise well enough to price it fairly.
So, this weekend I finally downloaded a free app (which resellers use) that scans barcodes and tells you how much money different big online companies, like Amazon or Powell's, will pay for them.
If a reseller pays the thrift store a dollar––our standard price for a paperback––and resells it to Amazon for three dollars, I don't care. They're welcome to it, and it saves me the trouble.
But now I'll know if some books are worth a whole lot more, and I'll price them higher--again, oddly, pricing them higher so they stay on the shelves for local readers.
The nadir was a bag of old telephone books and Ikea catalogs:
Not as bad but hardly stellar was 4 grocery bags of pop thrillers--the usual James Patterson, Patricia Cornwall, Tom Clancy, et al.
We get a million of these.
I price them at 49-cents each, hard- or paperback, and even at that, they don't fly off the shelves.
I decided to offload all four bags on a volunteer who'd asked me for books for her church's spring rummage sale.
I barely bothered to look through all the books, but . . . What's this?
One of these things is not like the others:
A first U.S. ed. (though not first printing) of Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar?
How did that end up among these modern bestsellers?
This edition sells for $20 and up.
I priced it $35 and put it in our glass case.
I've been trying to hit a balance where cool things are within reach of people who want to own them, and are also expensive enough to put off the people who buy to resell.
I used to shop at thrift stores to resell on ebay, so I'm somewhat sympathetic to re-sellers, but I'd rather the store get the money because we use it to fund our food bank and other programs that help a lot of people fulfill basic needs--things I care about.
Also the store is something of a community resource---there really are a lot of regulars, and I want to keep that lively.
It's taken me a while to decide what to do about resellers.
I finally figured that since they're a fact of life, it's the job of thrift stores (me) to know the merchandise well enough to price it fairly.
So, this weekend I finally downloaded a free app (which resellers use) that scans barcodes and tells you how much money different big online companies, like Amazon or Powell's, will pay for them.
If a reseller pays the thrift store a dollar––our standard price for a paperback––and resells it to Amazon for three dollars, I don't care. They're welcome to it, and it saves me the trouble.
But now I'll know if some books are worth a whole lot more, and I'll price them higher--again, oddly, pricing them higher so they stay on the shelves for local readers.