What's the monetary value of a find like this? It always boggles my mind when people jump straight to "bin it" rather than "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it". I guess sometimes you just need the headspace!
Often these transaction costs are both in time and in money, and people all value their time and money in different ways.
Disposing of this thing, which likely has a huge amount of emotional weight already embodied in it, via a specialist web site and interacting with a gazillion flakes is likely an exhausting prospect.
A DoT environmental is widely considered an arcade grail and is rare. It’s extremely sought after and the logistics of the size of the cabinet resulted in lots of them being trashed over the year or chopped up.
Or perhaps they just get thrown out when the barcade replaces the machines or goes out of business.
I think people underestimate the time and effort that goes into doing that. It's not as simple as "I'll see if anyone wants to buy it", now it's a project you have to manage. Not only do you have to deal with people contacting you about it but then you have to find a time/price/location that works for everyone and you get to deal with the long tail of "Is this still for sale?".
I mean for something like this I would absolutely put out feelers since I know there are people who would pay for it but in general I just donate stuff after posting in my friends chat to see if anyone wants it. It's just not worth the hassle, for myself it needs to be well over $100 before I try to sell it. Maybe that's "privilege", maybe that's "lazy", I don't know.
And we don't know what else was on the curb that was taken by the trash people; sometimes you get to a point where you decide that cleaning out fast is worth more than hoarding until you're able to sell everything.
Except ... ever tried to sell something worth $500+?
Good grief, the number of idiots. And it goes both ways.
Look, I know what I'm selling. I know what it sells for on FleaBay. Any offer below 50% of that and I'm going to tell you to pound sand (most of the time it's not even 10%--I mean, really?). I will throw it in the garbage rather than enable these kinds of morons. By the same token, if you give me about 65-75% of FleaBay, IT'S YOURS.
And, vice versa. Dude, I can see what the last 10 of these went for on FleaBay, and you're trying to get quadruple that. Get stuffed.