On Scrounging

Doing my thing this morning pickings were on the slim side.
Several of the regulars were missing so I had a leisurely time of it, but there wasn't much to be found.  It was a stretch to loosely fill one box, with one decent $10 internet book to cover the cost of the buy.

The one gal who habitually trolls through the 'media' bin wasn't around so I made a detour on the off chance some treasures would just be lying around for the taking.

And whadda ya know, there were.  I scored an unopened update for an Apple photo editing program that should go for $30 and an Anthrax VHS tape that was super clean and runs around $20 (apparently there was never a DVD release).

So.

45 minutes of sifting three bins of books = $10 in internet sales.
5 minutes sifting one bin of media junk = $50 in internet sales.

The difference being I enjoyed the 45 minutes spent diving for books, while the five minutes spent piling around CDs, DVDs, cassettes & VHS tapes was definitely work. Also, over the long haul I regularly pull $100 books out of the bins.  The sorting drones in back are lost without convenient barcodes, a modern affectation eshewed by valuable older books/

I know books- the phone is just to research unknowables (textbooks, murky religious stuff, contemporary fiction, etc).  I go through pulling everything good, then after I've plumbed the bins I sort out and look up the stuff that would *only* be good online.   With the media stuff I can't buy *anything* without checking because I know just enough to be dangerous (serious classical cds can be good, weird soundtracks cnn be good, jazz can be good, anything unopened is good because you can list it as 'new', some metal bands have fanatic followings so look up that concert tape, etc).

Just another morning kicking it with the Junk Ghouls.