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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

I haven't worked in a thrift store, so maybe you can fill me in on something:

It seems like there are "scalpers" (can't think of another word for them) who semi-professionally go through thrift stores buying up the good things, and then reselling them on ebay. I've definitely seen this with sports equipment.

(My fiance and I like going to thrift stores looking for art project supplies, and I always look over the golf clubs seeing if there is anything interesting in there [I am actually a golfer]).

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>It seems like there are "scalpers" (can't think of another word for them) who semi-professionally go through thrift stores buying up the good things, and then reselling them on ebay.

sounds like arbitrage to me.

'Flipping'/'flippers' is another term commonly used

Same thing with used book stores. Basically just exploiting arbitrage opportunity in the inefficient used clothing market. Unless you pay people to price things more accurately or can identify the resellers reliably this seems difficult to combat.

If you can price things accurately yourself the resellers won't have arbitrage opportunities and you'll make more money. And if you can't price things accurately yourself you'll gain nothing by excluding arbitraging resellers, so I don't see why they're worth trying to exclude.

I used to go to a local book reseller hoping to find a deal, a book worth more than fifty cents. Its kinda fun, they could always lure me in for an hour and I always left with extra stuff... sell the sizzle not the steak. In the long run if they "lost" ten dollars on one nice book that they underpriced for me, I probably bought five pieces of junk for two bucks each that aren't actually worth anything so they at least break even (or probably better). As long as the cost of perfect pricing is higher than the profit off moving some impulse purchase trash... This sets a very tight constraint for how much you spend as a business owner on perfect pricing.

Then again, for a homeless person who brings net negative value to the business bu being there and their time is worth $0/hr... you can't pay a clerk $11/hr or $15/hr or whatever the new minimum wage demand is, if you're competing against homeless who repel the regular clientele.

They're one of the many resellers on Amazon now; there's no point in visiting their local store anymore, because anything worth more than the fuel value of burning it is being diverted to Amazon so by definition the store has nothing left in it that's worth reading. Its also faster and easier and better selection to find anything worth reading on Amazon rather than going to the store. They're trying to branch out into selling weird trinkets kinda like how Barnes and Noble is less than 50% books. In the long run they're on the downward slope of all retail to sell only urgent convenience store swill and spontaneous gifts.

Accurately is a misleading word. It depends on what your goals are. Maybe you prefer to make a bit less profit so that people can read more, as a public service. Or maybe you're just using those books to attract people into the store.

Finally, the scanners don't know if you can price "accurately", so if you can, they're just occupying space and blocking ways for no benefit to anyone.

All thrift stores I know of and have donated to exist to raise money for a charity. They should be thrilled to move stock. But the vast majority of books are next to worthless, so your "read more" crowd will have plenty of options, and won't care that some rare first edition got picked up for premium pricing.

If scanners don't find anything to resell (because you've already scanned and correctly priced, or even listed online yourself), they'll leave soon enough.

I assumed they felt that the thrift store was basically a charity helping the less fortunate buy clothes for a discounted price and that resellers buying all the decent stuff was taking away from the needy.

I meant the used book store case. I have a hard time thinking of used books with high resale value that the needy need. Maybe they exist. Valuable used books are generally out of print due to low sales. Or they're specialty books that weren't ever printed/read in large numbers. I'm happy that I got some expensive-on-Amazon old books from the free giveaway shelf of a technical library, but I don't think the needy are often looking for Opioid Analgesics: Chemistry and Receptors in the first place.

Used bookshops used to be plagued by 'scanners,' people who would come in with internet-connected UPC guns and scan every single item to see if they found something they could sell for more online.

I don't know if it's still a thing though. It was painfully irritating when they'd do it in the library.

Oh, to be plagued by people showing you a zero-barrier-to-entry method to increase your revenue. The absolute rascals.

Partner worked in two s/h bookshops OZ/UK. The painful part is when they are amateur, and don't deal fairly with you over your own stocking and shelving policies. Leaving a trail of badly re-shelved books behind is trashing your farm. The good part is that you wise up and realize you have to do more input work on your stock to price it, if you don't want to become part of the wholesale chain. Or, learn to live with it and accept a different profit model.

Now me, as a customer? I walked out of one shop here in brisbane when I found a treasure (architects drawings from pugins practice, neoclassical sketches of British buildings) and they refused to honour the written price which was (I acknowledge) undervaluing the book, but none the less reflected what somebody had thought the book was worth, righ up until I decided to buy it. Yes, this is strictly illegal. its also impossible to police in practice. I should have reported them, I just decided never to shop there again.

Ex seller of huge numbers of books (we're kindle now. books are dirty and feed roaches in the tropics) -I salt the valuable ones in amongst the trash, because I want you, the book buyer, to buy the box not the ones you want of high worth. There have to be a lot of high worth books, to make it worth my time to sort them out, and I'm left with the remove-the-trash problem I was motivated with in the first place.

This is the deal: you buy all my books and I accept I get less than high water mark price for the jewels, but I do get my shelves emptied.

"Flippers" would be the term you're looking for.

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