If you found vintage cards at a garage sale

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Posted By: davidcycleback

Several years ago there was an elderly woman who wanted to sell an SF Hess baseball card (forgett the ACC, but the real photo one of Major League players). She said she wouldn't take less than $20 for it. I paid her $800 for it. I later resold it for profit, so we were both happy.

And in case you want to know, she literally kept it in a cabinet drawer.

To me, it depends on the person. If he's a professional dealer who makes his money by setting the prices, there's great no need to alert. It also depends on the pricing difference. If it's a $100 item priced at $40 or even $30, there no concern, in part because at a garage sale people are often just trying to get stuff out the door as they're moving or whatever. However, if it's $10,000 priced at 10 cents, that's a different story.

Garage sales are garage sales. No one goes to a Xerox flyer-stapled-to-a-telephone-pole advertized sale which is comprised of mostly used stuff piled on card tables in someone's oil stained garage and anticipates Tiffany or even Walmart prices. If there is an original Van Gogh with a $2 price tag you should alert the owner, but the sellers are probably well aware that prices are 'garage sale low' and that someone with a good eye can pick up some bargains. Most garage sales are about 'reducing bulk' in the houeshold, and much of the unsold stuff will likely literally be put on the curb or in dumpsters the following week.

I bought a very expensive wieght machine from a guy for like $5. I asked him why he was selling it so cheap. He said he was moving to a tenth story condo downtown, and had no desire to move it. Getting rid of it for $5 was a deal for both of us.

Also, unless you are experienced with selling that item, you may have no real idea of what it would sell for. If you don't sell autographs, you may know that that Ted Williams signed bat with good COA is worth good money but won't know exactly how much. You may not know if you can sell it for $500 or $100. In this case even if it turns out to be worth $500, paying $75 or $50 may have been a fair price at the time for what you know. As we all know, knowledge of book price doesn't mean knowledge of resale value.

Lastly, the vast majority of novices vastly overvalue rather than undeprice their item. For every 1958 Topps Mickey Mantle ExMt priced at $1 (which I've yet to see by the way), there are 103 1958 Topss Micke Mantles grade poor priced at $1,000 ... In practice the more common problem is if and how to break it to a person that he has waaay overpriced an item.

In Seattle, there are dealers and antique store owners who go to all garage sales looking for steals for reseale. They often camp out before the published start time hoping to get first dibs. A few years ago, my mom and her friends had a garage sale in my parent's front yard. It was quality stuff they wanted to get rid of. Things were priced at like $2, $1, 25 cents. One of the known antique dealers brought a fine condition kitchen table with matching chairs with 25 cents price tag to the cash register. He tried to fairly snottily negotiate the price down to 10 cents. My mom told him she wouldn't sell it to him if he offered $100, and asked him to leave. Neither my mom nor I could figure out what was the point of trying to lower the price 15 cents on a 25 cent items.

A seller is always in an advantagous position when he doesn't have to the item. If you have medical bills due next Tuesday, the potential buyer has advantage. Otherwise, if you you tire of a person's intricate negotiations over price, you can simply tell them it's no longer for sale and mean it.

I once had a 'negotiator' who, after email negotiations, ask me what was the lowest price I would sell the bunch of photos for. Innocent me, I gave him the lowest price I would sell them for. After he asked to lower the price $10 more, I told him the photographs were no longer for sale. He asked if that meant he could buy for my previously quoted lowest price, and I said, no, that that meant they were no longer for sale. I was offended enough to abort the sale as I had honestly answered the question he had posed, and he essentially assumed I was lying. I didn't know what the point of a him asking me a question in the first place, and I wasn't interested in negotiating any longer to find out.