Ridiculous asking prices for second hand stuff

[jarhead123]

Just wanting a rant really. So many times I see on FB people selling their old shit for ridiculous money.

Someone was selling a christmas jumper for £8. You can get them new for that!

Someone else selling 2 packs of straws for £1.50.

Another person was selling some disney books (really old, probably new when I was a kid in the 80's) and she wanted £10!!

Does anyone every buy this overpriced stuff?!

I experienced the flipside of this when trying to sell a used bike. The bike was on a par with other bikes of the same model. I got a number of messages from people who seemed to think i should offer a substantial discount as 'they just wanted to use it at the weekend' or 'I'm only going to use it for commuting'.

Why would you think I'd give you a discount on those grounds? I don't give two fucks what you do with once you've bought it and that in no way determines the value of the item. Ride the bike atound the world or leave it to go rusty in the shed, i don't care.

Having had a bike for sale at a prox

I seen someone selling
advent calanders for 1.50 each or two for £2 nothing fancy either just kids peppa pig and paw patrol ones!! they are that price in the shops

The second family didn't do anything wrong, TigerTooth

There's no law saying that anyone who can afford to must give their stuff away for free

Any scandi clothes tend to go for near enough the price they were bought at. Fine by me, I just resell mine when done... But some of the states "playwear" is in!

I think pricing for second hand selling depends on a range of factors. As a seller, you may be selling whatever you can because you need whatever money you can get. In this case you may be prepared to take a very low price although you were hoping for more. You may be selling for other reasons such as to free up space, in which case you may not be bothered about making money. In either of these cases, if you pitch the price too high you will not sell and therefore not achieve your aim. On the other hand, for some items like certain books or collectibles, if you happen to have something unusual or something which happens to be what that particular customer wants (say the one item they need to complete a set that they have spent years collecting) you can stick out for a higher price. I once found an old Farnborough Air Show programme (1950''s if I remember rightly) on the street and took it to a car boot sale shortly after as I happened to be going with various bits I wanted to get rid of. The cover price had been 5 shillings but when a guy come along who showed interest I asked £5 as I could honestly say "Where else are you going to get one?" and he paid up. I've also been to a table sale where I made about £100 altogether selling things which I had mostly got for free - board games which were left behind in my flat by previous residents, free gifts that had come with high-end cosmetics etc. Then again, some years ago when it looked as though vinyl was dying out I took all my LPs to a specialist second hand store and they pointed out that people who wanted vinyl already had pretty much everything I was offering so they couldn't give me more than a few pence per record.

There's a seller in the local mums group who sells brand new designer items from tkmaxx at a discount to the original designer price, but above tkmaxx's. She does not even remove tkmaxxs tags, you can clearly see them in the photos (presumably to return if no one wants it).
People seem to be interested!

We often donate our unused items or sell themvery cheaply just so that they are gone. However recently we decided to sell our kitchen aid stand mixer, perfect working and aesthetic condition and at a fraction of new asking price. Still got people offering two thirds of what we asked! We sold for what we asked though.

I don't have face book but I do have a nosey on gumtree for things sometimes and yes people are so greedy. I once saw someone s3lling the Ikea toy kitchen for £70, £10 more than the shop was selling it at the time, I know for a fact because my mum had just bought one the week before 😂. I felt like messaging that person to ask if they were kidding, but I didn't.

People do pay pre for Ikea stuff as they aren’t always an easy shop to get to and don’t deliver (well, they can but it isn’t cheap), so people might pay a bit more for an Ikea item that’s local.

I do this. On the rare occasion I sell second-hand stuff, I price it on the high side or nearest offer (always lower than new, though). Sure, sometimes there are no takers and I have to re-list at a lower price. Sometimes people get in touch with a lower offer, which I am often happy to accept. And surprisingly often, someone will actually buy it at that price. I figure I have absolutely nothing to lose, apart from the half-minute it takes to re-post.

I do this because (a) it satisfies my wheeler-dealer streak and (b) where I live, if you price things too low or try to give them away to a good home (both of which I’ve tried), you get bombarded with calls from dodgy second-hand dealers who will sell them on at a profit anyway.

To be fair, I buy second-hand stuff myself more often than I sell it, mainly for environmental reasons, and I am willing to pay reasonably high prices. If it’s in good condition and exactly what I’m looking for, I will definitely pay more than half the retail price – yes, it means the first owner will have had use of a new item for less than half the price, but so what? I am still saving money and reducing the amount of future landfill. And yes, I will then sometimes sell it on (occasionally at a profit) when I’ve finished with it if it’s still in good condition.

What gets to me is the time wasters. I recently listed a designer children's item, brand new with tags in perfect condition. I listed it as less than half the price it is new, so not a greedy price at all. I had 8 time wasters. They would ask about it, say they want it, then go silent. So I then had to wait a decent amount of time before offering it to the next time waster in line, and the process starts again. It really did get to the point where I thought this is really not worth it. The lady who bought it in the end was lovely though, and thrilled with her purchase.

I wish I could say I'm in a financial position to just give things away, but I'm not, especially with Christmas coming up. The designer item was a gift by the way, so I'm not wasting money on things I can't afford.

The best is when you are giving something away free of charge and some c.f. asks you to deliver!!

I belong to some Mulberry Facebook groups and people often buy a secondhand bag, and decide they don’t like it and ‘only’ ask for what they paid for it plus PayPal and postage. The next person does the same, again adding on PayPal and postage, and eventually the bag must be reaching the price it have been new.

Tigertooth, it’s not for you to decide how people should spend their money. You wanted that violin and went to get it. The extras were theirs to sell or otherwise. Up to them. The first family were kind and possibly just wanted rid of the clutter. You really are being very judgemental about something that is simply a different mindset to selling and nothing to do with wealth. The mindset could easily have been reversed. You’re just judgemental.

Also wanting to point out that violins vary in price considerably. Plus they actually increase in value as time goes by. A “2nd hand violin” is much better than a brand spanking new one!

if someone has to buy second hand shoes for their kids as obv they are a bit down on their luck then why not give them away for free?,

Not necessarily, if someone is selling good condition shoes in a style I like in the right size then why would I bother buying them brand new even though I can afford it?

There's a woman on my local fb group who keeps bumping her sylvanian family cottage that she wants £50 for. It's missing the original furniture and consists of mismatched furniture/items and two mismatched figurines - the cottage is £14.99 brand new and comes with furniture and 1 figure

The Boden and Jojo sites crack me up. £8 for a well worn, wash faded slightly stained dress for 'playwear' - the scary thing is some wally actually pays it plus postage (I've done well on those groups )

It's also pretty epidemic on my local groups with people trying to sell 241 vouchers for merlin attractions for £5. Inevitably someone will respond to remind them that they could just buy a pack of chocolate buttons for £1.50 and get one from the packaging.

I admit I do sometimes ask on fb for a bit more (say, £5) than I really want as most people try to haggle.

I admit I go out of my way to wind them up. I'll often post a link to the item at half the price new and ask 'is it this one?'

But I'm a cow 😂

I also play a game I call 'spot the person who has shoplifted a bunch of stuff, and is selling it on.....'

what are the giveaways for sellers on shoplif-book LoudestRoar?

I know what you mean.

Some charity shops British heart foundation are the same.

I'm thrifty and buy a fair amount of second hand things so I come across this sort of CF a lot.

I’d probably pay near store price for an Ikea piece of furniture if it meant I didn’t have to spend a whole day screaming at badly drawn instruction manual trying to figure out why part A does not want to fit into part C and questioning all my life choices leading up to that very moment and contemplating stabbing myself in the eye with an Allen key

Last year I listed an ice-cream maker for £3. It was good and new but I wanted to get rid of it.

A woman came to see it and she went away. A couple of days later she came again. This time she wanted to know if she could return it if her children didn't get into home made ice-cream.

I told her to try John Lewis and her answer was "but they are expensive in JL!!".

In the end she took it, but I was so tempted to just keep it. What a CF!

Earlier whilst browsing through my local page there was a lady was trying to sell a very VERY stained duvet. Her excuse was she had opened a BBQ sauce whilst changing the bed covers and that's what the staining was. I don't think anyone is convinced enough so far

*who was

I was once helping my friend to pack up at a car boot sale and she had an old VHS player which hadn't sold. A guy walked past me and I said "you don't want a video player do you?" to which he said "Yeah, OK then" so I said, it's a pound please (every little helps eh? :D) to which he said "Nah, I won't bother then!!"

Similarly, I sold an entire pram system (pram/pushchair/carrycot/car seat - all Mamas and Papas and only a couple of years old) for £15 at a sale. 5 minutes later the woman brought it back saying it was damaged. The "damage" was a slight crack in a bit of the plastic cup holder, didn't affect the use of any of the equipment at all! She demanded her money back!! What do people want for £15 - it cost about £450 new!!

Agree that people do expect too much sometimes though, but they typically don't sell.