Can you explain this?
I’m trying to buy at the standard price for the books in the store. The pitted parties are doing what you are referring to for pecuniary reasons. I’m not.
How am I screwing the authors though?
As I’ve often said, my Mom and I once bought a KISS traschcan at a garage sale and sold it at a toy show for $125. Unless the “book sharks” are literally knocking people down or literally taking things out of other shoppers hands, I fail to see the problem.
Everyone who buys anything there is doing that. They are not loitering and pawing all the items in the store though.
Authors get paid when consumers buy their stuff from the primary market, or check it out from a library. They get nothing when books are sold on the secondary market.
That’s equally true of both thrift stores and eBay. But a person doing the legwork to discover the highest secondary market price is helping the author, because that narrows the incentive gap between buying new and used.
So when you’re taking advantage of a thrift store pricing their wares sub-optimally, you’re in effect cheating the author. Resellers with their scanners are actually helping the author.
Just admit you like free/cheap stuff, and you don’t want to share your precious store space with the hoi polloi.
Don’t dress this up as some kind of literary crusade. You’re not the good guy here.
Did your folks show up at the sale with a scanner and monopolize the place, and paw all the items first? Did they sell it to someone who arrived late at the sale? Or who had to wait for them to finish to get closer than 6 feet to the items?
Your folks seem like my kind of people actually.
Portable USB scanners didn’t exist at the time. How exactly and precisely does one “monopolize the place”? We ALWAYS search through all the items, looking for hidden treasure.
Fine, substitute “readers” for “hobbyists,” the point is the same. I don’t actually support people being obnoxious, if that means what is commonly thought of as rude behavior or worse.
As for exploitative, who is being exploited? The person who donated the book? No. The thrift shop? No, if a book is bought it is at the price they set for it. It’s you, isn’t it? You feel exploited because you can’t get what you want when someone else is in your way, someone else who got there before you did, and who isn’t moving aside so you can browse. Someone who (worst of all!) isn’t going to read the books they buy but is going to re-sell them for a profit. The only thing they are exploiting is their own knowledge and labor to actually find those books that are worth re-selling.
It would be better for all of us if you were banned from the thrift store. Then the resellers wouldn’t risk catching COVID from you and we could all have a chance to buy the rare books they find rather than having you spreading germs to hoard books.
I am never going to whatever charity bookstore you were in but I routinely search for used books online. I’d much rather pay people to spend the hours sorting through the crap to get me the gems even if it’s at a higher price than I would have paid sorting through the crap myself. Those illerate thugs are doing literate people who don’t want to get sick a service.
I’m one of those who don’t see the problem. If I’m a bookseller, I’d be happy as a clam to unload as much inventory as possible to these guys. Sales are sales. I could leave them on my shelves for the “booklovers” to find, maybe, perhaps, and make a fraction of my sales or these guys can sweep up my store. Or I can get off my ass and scan and sell the books myself, if I feel it worth my while. I see no problem from a seller’s point of view.
The charity part is not for your benefit, it’s what they do with the profits.
The only problem here is that the charity isn’t selling the books for as much as they could be, meaning that the money is going to the scalpers rather than the people the charity supposedly supports.
Of course, but the charity could do their own legwork in selling the items at the highest price possible, if they wanted to. It’s quite possible they don’t want to deal with the time and effort involved in doing such a thing and it’s quicker and easier for them simply to have the book sharks do it for them and make the quick sale. It’s just kind of the basics of our capitalistic system. A company makes a thousand widgets, a reseller/retailer buys them at a lower price and takes on the burden of finding a thousand customers to which they could store, sell and transport those widgets at, say, double or triple the price.
I still don’t get this…were they English textbooks of some sort? How does your comment relate to him not looking inside these books?
I think I fall in the middle here.
On the one hand, I think @drad_dog’s outrage is overblown. And I’m entirely unclear on why it’s ok for drad_dog to go to the thrift store and handle books during a pandemic for their own personal reading pleasure, but it’s somehow outrageous for someone to do the same to try to earn a living.
On the other hand, I think a lot of posters are missing or overlooking an issue with resellers scooping up books at a thrift store. The sorts of charitable thrift stores I’m familiar with (and I think the sort drad_dog was at) serve a dual purpose.
On the one hand, they sell donated goods to raise revenues for the charity. On that level, the thrift store doesn’t care who buys the books, and the resellers are actually probably benefiting the charity by increasing churn.
But the other purpose of a thrift store is to provide an opportunity for people with limited financial means to acquire goods they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. It’s here that I think the resellers are problematic. There are people that love reading, love books, and love to own books, but can’t afford to buy new books, or even used books at “fair market” prices. Thrift shops, before the rise of internet-powered arbitragers, were a god-send for such people (and, yes, I’m speaking from personal experience here, albeit brief).
And it’s not just people that want to own a few books for their personal pleasure. One of most powerful indicators of future academic performance is also one of the simplest: are there books in a child’s home? I’ve personally known families that were able to build nice little family libraries almost solely on thrift store and library sale purchases, and were able to thus pass on not just the contents of those books but more importantly an appreciation of knowledge, and books, and learning to their kids.
The thrift stores I’m familiar with very deliberately don’t try to price the goods they sell at “fair market values”. A vital part of the charity service they provide is precisely that they deliberately sell goods below market value. Of course, there were always arbitragers in various fields (and middle class folks looking for a bargain that didn’t need to shop in a thrift store). But prior to the rise of internet-powered arbitrage, there weren’t enough of them to seriously disrupt that aspect of thrift store sales. Now, increasingly, there are.
Of course, some of those arbitragers themselves are economically struggling, and arbitraging for them isn’t just a side hustle for some spare cash, but an element of hustling to survive.
So, I don’t personally think it’s quite as simple as “fuck those arbitraging vultures” vs. “thrift stores are just dong a terrible job of efficient pricing.”
As long as these people are polite, who cares why they are buying used books.
But they’re anything but polite. Pre-pandemic my wife and I would go to a lot of library used book sales. There would be enough of those “scanner people” ,as we called them, to effectively block aisles. I’d quick eyeball titles and move on to the next section if nothing caught my interest, but they, as has been said above, have to physically check each ISBN code with their scanners so they just stand there and do that like so many Borg. I know both sides of the debate, but really think that libraries should have the first night for regular customers and not let the scanner people in until the second.
Forget it E, it’s Chinatown.
Agree, this is not a simple issue - I can argue either side. My personal objection to these flippers is that they take the fun out of yard sales and thrift stores. To me, a yard sale is to get rid of things I don’t want and maybe make a few dollars for lunch, while giving someone else an opportunity to get a great deal on something they want/need. But watching a reseller swoop through and scoop up all those good deals to resell leaves a sour taste & defeats the purpose of the sale. So I no longer do yard sales.
I also have reservations about donating to thrift stores. Most thrift stores now sell anything of value (that they recognize) on Ebay, and anything they miss is more likely to go to a reseller than the people I was hoping to help. Again, just leaves a bad taste.
But there’s really nothing wrong with what these resellers do. What is wrong with using your expertise & time to make a living? How are they different from, say, an antique dealer?
For a look at the other side, check out r/flippers, a subreddit by & for the people OP is raging about.
Yeah, if they’re blocking aisles and causing trouble and being a general nuisance in that way, sure, kick them out if you’re a store owner and find the behavior problematic. If you think they’re bringing in more sales than the amount of sales you’re losing to people who are turned off by this and go somewhere else, let them stay. Or I like the idea of one day for scanner people, another day for the regular book buyers. That sounds like a reasonable solution to all involved.