It’s similar with our parish. We have a huge collection of books. I sometimes volunteer to help lug them from the storage area, which isn’t being used for anything else, to set them out for sale in a couple of used book sales per year. The prices are rock bottom. Still, a lot of them are always left after each sale, and people are always donating more. If we were to actually try to value them book by book and price accordingly…that would be a big extra task. As would staffing a continuous year round sale. Kind of like being in the used book business :)… which the church isn’t. And like a public library, the institution is there in part for public service so if it ends up basically giving some people books they want but couldn’t make room for in their budgets at a bookstore price, that’s not the end of the world. OTOH if you go into the used book biz for profit you have to accept you’ll have competition from various sources (estate sales, libraries, churches, whatever) selling a random selection of books for almost nothing, that’s just how it is. You make your money from people who need particular titles at a particular time.
We almost never buy day to day used items as from a yard sale or Craigslist. We’re at the age where we have to control the pile up of junk or it will overwhelm us. I have specific book interest so buy used books fairly often generally with bookfinder.com as my guide, sometimes on ebay. Even with some experience (no expert) on what various titles go for I also often think the high offers on those services are ridiculous. I mean if you can pull up bookfinder and see that somebody has it for $50 and you want $200, similar ostensible condition, what are you actually thinking? But you see that fairly often.
Says Mr. Money Bags! I can feed my four urchins for a week on $20!
Actually, we are even more lazy. The charity place picks up our stuff form the porch.
And I don’t really care if the place I give my stuff to is a charity, or a commercial establishment. I want it out of my life. If they can make money rehoming it, then:
I win – I got rid of it
They win – they made a profit
The buyer wins – they got something they want
The environment wins – less crap in the land fill
I’m hoping the planned stuff on Monday goes well, after which I will have less excess furniture and someone in need of furniture will have their needs fulfilled. Hell, I’m even volunteering to use my pick up as transport. I suppose that means I’ll actually lose a bit on the deal from a financial viewpoint, but I don’t care - the good karma makes up for a quarter tank of gas and a few hours of my time. AND I’ll be reducing the stress-inducing clutter in my life. That’s worth a few pennies right there.
Ex-library materials cannot be directly resold except by the library; if you see such things at a thrift store, etc. it was probably purchased from the library’s book store, and the person gave it to the thrift store when they were done reading it. They also cannot be donated except for some very limited recipients, so Friends of the Library sells them ourselves and the money goes for things that aren’t in the library’s budget.
People donate books and other items of their own all the time, and probably 99.9% of it is not suitable for the collection and they know it. First priority in the store goes to ex-library materials, and then the donated materials if and when we have space, especially if they’re recent releases. We also have an Amazon account for things that aren’t suitable for the store, whether they are rare, valuable, contain explicit sex or violence but are not pornographic, etc. We also have a contract with a re-seller and ship a lot of things to them, and they periodically send us a check for our share.
In cases like that, church book sale, (though library or estate sales could be similar) it’s because
a) there are have more book donations always coming in
b) it’s a labor input to price individual books at different levels and the volunteers don’t have the expertise to do that quickly off the cuff
c) you find that rock bottom is the only across the board pricing level that makes the inventory move
d) if the church gives away excess value it’s not the end of the world because one of the missions is service to the community, even though the direct purpose of the sale is to raise cash.
Also wrt b) and d), you assume with books mainly donated by living people that those people mainly filtered out any highly valuable books.