Crate Digging for Vinyl

I guess it all about location. I bought 69 records at three different thrift stores less than 15 miles from my house yesterday and 40 today at three different thrift stores less than 5 blocks from my house. I got a wide variety as well: Humble Pie; Leon Russell; Savoy Brown; Lightin' Hopkins; John Lennon; Wings; Kitty Wells; Buck Owens; Merle Haggard; Miles Davis; The Miricles. I also got a bunch of interesting stuff that I don't know much or anything about. I guess if you have predetermined what you want thrifts aren't a good option, but if you enjoy a surprise they have a lot to offer.

 

Sounds good!

Sadly though in NY thrift stores aren’t worth the time. Even if there is a interesting title it is usually scratched

 

Livin the dream eh? I'm looking up directions to your area right now!

 

I should too. 100 thrift store record finds in two days, including Miles Davis and John Lennon. Sounds hard to believe. I’m going to need to scope out these thrift stores

 

It feels that way after a few dud trips, but the best thrift store is always the one you can visit the most (Except for my local Value Village, they've been absolute dreck since a record store moved in across the parking lot). Scrounging ain't easy but the $2 Skip James & autographed Canned Heat LP I found yesterday keeps the excitement going.

 

I've thought about it and I think I know why I have good results, and like real estate it's all about location, location, and location. I live in a town of about 2k that has 8 thrift stores. There are similar small towns all around me. I can drive 30 miles to the north or south and be in large cities. When I look in Raleigh or Fayetteville the thrifts are picked over and I seldom find much. There are lots of people doing what I do in the cities. But those same people don't drive out of the city to these small towns. So my competition for second hand records is much smaller.

 

I've bought from these guys before & the vinyl they sell has always been very clean shape.

Darryl

 

Thanks for posting that. They are looking for visually perfect and almost perfect records. He didn't even address listen grading which seems kind of strange to me. They offer a product for a certain type of collector. I can understand that but I guess I'm more of a listening collector. For me it is more about discovering new music, exploring works that I missed out on for financial reasons in the past (we can't buy every record when it is originally released by ever artist we ever liked) or finding music that I've enjoyed in past but for some reason (lost it, wore it out, had the 8-track or cassette) don't have anymore. I want a record that plays as clean as possible but a certain degree of surface noise isn't a deal breaker, just a reason to pay less. I don't put nearly the importance on the cover condition that they do. Heck if it is worn that just indicates that someone enjoyed it a lot.

 

There is no ideal way to sell - every method has its drawbacks. Having a booth at a shop is nice but expect damage, shoplifting, & scummy people to switch pricier records into cheap priced covers. The person at the counter is not likely to check - or know how to check - or simply won't. The best way to have a booth type sales outlet is price everything the same: all records $3 or something like that. Also, more worn / scuffy records will typically sell well since many casual buyers aren't that fussy.

It is comletely arbitrary. One persons NM is anothers VG-. What grade is a clean NM-like record with a musty moldy scent? What about a pristine barely played NM record.....with 'Tim Johnson' in bold felt pen across the labels?

Visual grading can be done with great accuracy. After decades of collecting I can usually nail the sound grade of a record spot-on, just by looking at it. Not perfect every time, I still miss stuff.

 

Thanks for this post. It is very helpful.

 

Is that Vortex that moved in? I was there about a year ago (or two) when they just moved in and they seemed ridiculously over-priced. So much so that I haven't been back since. Are they still that way?

 

Oh yeah, Vortex is pretty exorbitant when it comes to the big-name artists and items that are VG+ or better, otherwise the place has been pretty good to me for finding hidden gems. I'm a frequent customer so he cuts me deals now and then but early on he was a lot stricter with grading and you could pull some real winners for $1-3, not so much anymore.

 

It seems the used record stores are all off on their grading and overpriced. So much so that the ones around here don't offer a grade at all, you just take your chances.

 

This seems like the same issue round my parts. Around 2013-14 record stores would have strict grading policies. If they were below VG+ then they would price them 1-3 dollars no matter what the title is. Now those same records are 10 dollars and up. Hey can’t blame the owners for wanting to make money.

 

Especially here in the NW where high rents, taxes and bag bans make running a small business quite painful. There's still one record store chain around here (3 locations, closest thing to a record store chain we have left) that's still super discriminatory about vinyl condition, in no small part because they are still clinging to CDs as their main product and most of their LP bins are taken up by overpriced reissues that don't move... so their dollar bins are overflowing with awesome records, many that only have cover issues and only need a light dusting. They are the exception to the rule nowadays.

 

I used to love record stores like that. Main Street Jukebox in Pennsylvania used to have amazing dollar records! Now anything less than 10 dollars is just Easy listening stuff.

 

I've been have some good luck recently doing virtual crate digging. I've been buying lots of 24 on ebay for $25.99 and come up with some great records in VG shape usually. Sure some of them aren't especially what I would buy but more than half are always very much keepers so I'm paying less that $2 a record if you only count the ones I really want. I recently found another seller there that offers 50 records for $44.99 and you can request that one genre be left out of the mix. I asked for no rap/hip hop the first time and ended up with a lot of classical, singer songwriters, classic rock and a couple of jazz, country and comedy records. I just ordered another and requested no classical this time. As a result of this I've added a lot of Dave Mason, Moody Blues, Ozark Mt Daredevils, Cat Stevens, NRPS, all commons I know but mostly stuff I didn't already have. And it is kind of like getting a Christmas present in the mail every couple of weeks! It really doesn't take much to give me a thrill.

 

Found this thrifty last week. Recorded and mixed Dec. 1974 at Gung-Ho Recording in Cleveland,Ohio. Fantasy Band is/was Jeff Williams
and Billy Barnett. This is an interesting acoustic album well played and sung with a tip of the hat to Pentangle for the arrangement on Lord Franklin and Bert Jansch for Rosemary Lane. Most of the other tunes are originals with a credit to R. McGuinn for the tune on Sherman's Blues.

Not sure if Jeff Williams is the noted Jazz drummer who came from Ohio,anybody familiar with this album or band? I recommend it if you see one but probably rare/htf. Seems they've gone for $20-40 on the bay but one might be waiting around the corner at your favorite thrift.

 

Despise these types with a passion.

 

It's bad enough they are hogging the crates but the fact that they have to look up every single record on their phone to see if they are worth anything is even worse to me. I would have more respect for them if they knew their stuff.

It's like me deciding I am going to collect/flip baseball cards but I know nothing at all about baseball or baseball cards and I'm not even going to bother learning the basics when I can just google every single card! Do your homework.

 

Discount day at GW and found this beauty. Man, did this throw me for a loop . I only knew of The Jaggerz from the single The Rapper. This LP is nothing like that. This sounds like The Rascals meet The Temps. It's a Gamble production so it has that early Philly Sound too but with a bit of doo-wop on the vocals or something. It's a cool 60's blue-eyed Soul/Pop/Rock groover. I give it 3 1/2 shovels out of 5 on the dig it scale. Donnie Iris on guitar/vocals.

 

These days, I stay away from "collection purchases" due to a great majority of the collections that I've purchased in the past being common titles that I didn't want to store nor mess with trying to flip. These days, I only look for titles that interest me and/or are of some kind of value (something I can get for less than current online values).

For the past couple of years, thinking about what will happen to this stuff when I'm gone, I've taken to writing relevant info about the album on an index card and then placing it into the outer bag. I've got two daughters and if they want to list these titles individually then they will know by those cards what the current going rate is so that they don't get fleeced. I'm aware of how much effort it will take to sell 2,800 LP's (at the moment) individually, but should they choose to do so, I want them to know what's a fair price. They will also know by those cards what kind of price to ask for the whole collection.

 

Great find! I'm not familiar with them but that is just the type of record I like to come across, a surprise inside, like crackerjacks!

 

Hey, don't assume that any one who looks up records on their phone is a flipper!

I do in fact often look stuff up as I browse. Sometimes it's because I don't know much about the album and want to learn a bit more or I want to have a quick preview on Youtube. I also check prices to make sure that the seller/store is not way out of line in pricing their ware. For instance if a $2 record is priced at $10 by the seller, I may just pass because I'll probably be able to pick another copy up elsewhere at a better price.

 

I just like to dig and see what I can find. I never pull out the phone. If it turns out something I pick up for .75 or $2.00 is worth a whole lot that is just another surprise. It seldom happens though. Most records are going to be commons worth after cleaning up somewhere between a dollar and five dollars at most. I do have a seller that before we can settle on a price for a pile of records I've pulled out of his boxes takes out his phone to make sure there aren't any high dollar records. It is time consuming and never really reveals anything significant. He doesn't check everything and we end up settling on a price that averages out to somewhere between $1.35 and $1.75 per record.