Why do local record stores charge discogs pricing but not list on discogs?

There were definitely a lot of sealed box sets. Bowie's reality tour is one I recall. Plus a good bit of original pressings and Japanese ones with the obi. A whole lot of 60s-70s rock that weren't "commons." It was announced like two weeks ahead of time which I found bizarre. In the decade or so the store has been open I can't ever recall another time where one collector's buy back was ever announced and hyped considering they get stuff every single day.

 

Bricks and mortar stores have far fewer customers. Also, the fixed costs for rent, etc. means they have to shift product all the time. They can't just sit on high prices and wait for someone to buy their records.

 

Because Discogs is their competitor?

Presumably the stores want people to visit the store in person.

 

The places I go to see enough traffic that things move fast. It has really picked up in the last year or so. Typical Saturday afternoon will see at least ten other folks going through the bins and glancing at their phone apps. I go through the bins A-B every two weeks or so and nothing of interest is there from one visit to the next. I don't even bother going through Bowie, Zep, Doors, etc because the pickings are slim and the prices are insane. Three years ago these places were pretty empty. They have all been around for twenty years plus so they are doing something right. One place I go to doesn't even bother to sort them out and file, they just go into "new arrivals" and go within a few days.

 

The irony is that what most do. They sit on high prices and wait forever...

 

I've made the mistake of selling a $100 record for a few bucks to a local record store. Before discogs, I would routinely trade my unwanted records for some meager store credit. I got tired of getting so little that I started selling on discogs . What a night and day difference. Of my collection of ~300 records, 20 have sold for over $40. That's nearly a $1000 that I would have just got pennies on the dollar had I sold them in locally...

 

Meager store credit can be eliminated by "eBay completed", the store owners' nightmare. "We Buy Gold" places are even funnier. Spot on eBay, hundreds less at the stores. What took you so long 12" 45rpm NYC to figure out you were getting hosed? Always go to eBay completed for anything.

 

If you have a well-cared-for record collection with titles that are in any way desirable, you can get so much more money out of them by selling them on eBay or Discogs rather than taking them to a local record store. Selling online is harder: you have to buy record mailers, tape, and bubble wrap, photograph and grade the records, write the eBay listings, and probably wait weeks or months for all of your items to sell. However, the amount of money you get out of that work is worth it. Taking a big box of your records to the local record store and relying on the kindness of the owner is a sucker’s game.

 

I can't think of any two record stores that are exactly the same. You can't generalize them. People and markets vary. How each one grades, prices, sells, and buys is going to be completely independent of any other store.

I work at a small store that's been around for 40 years. The only stuff that goes online is stuff we don't think will sell in the store (usually too niche) with the occasional old stock (which is usually RSD crap leftovers that we hope to get something near what cost was). Do we use Discogs as a guide? Of course. I'm not going to try to sell Steve Miller for a few bucks online when I know I can get a lot more for a clean copy in store. Especially since the resurgence, there's still enough old white guys that want to buy what they've heard a million times on the radio already.

Point is, there wouldn't be a store if it all went online. And for someone who does put stuff online, that part of the game gets pretty old and tedious. Then it's just about numbers. Associating with people in real time or pointing someone in a direction and turning them onto something is still gratifying. Part of collecting mentality is finding stuff "in the wild."

 

That is interesting to learn that common and popular stuff sells for more than discogs. I am still surprised there are enough "old white guys" out there who have never heard of discogs/ebay AND don't already have all these common titles in their collection.

 

They probably did have them, but got rid of them in the great purge of the 80s and 90s. Not everyone has heard of discogs. Some people still think Amazon prices are a true indicator of the market.

 

Fair enough. But a local record would need to sell thousands of such common titles every month to cover their high operating costs. Are there really thousands of clueless collectors in the local communities these stores serve? And how are they replenishing their stock of these common records that they can resell for huge markups? When I search locally on craigslist and FB marketplace I just see poorly graded overpriced stuff.

 

In my neck of the woods (VA), local record stores don't ever stop selling common titles. The Beatles, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Neil Young. Anything that's still popular with the kids or still influential sells. A used copy of LZ IV will bring $18-30, depending on condition, seven days a week. New copies of Abbey Road are perennially best sellers on vinyl. It's the common titles that keep local record stores afloat.

 

There are plenty of people who don't have the time to go crate digging. But you are right, the store is not going to make big bucks on common titles, although some like Rumours or Thriller are easy sellers and difficult to keep in stock.

 

The counterpoint to this is that if you built that awesome record collection out of records that you bought in used record stores, then selling them back to used record stores is a mitzvah for the record collectors to come, and it helps keep those stores open.

I don't see my record collection as an investment strategy. Any LP or CD in my collection is "worth" whatever I paid for it, not what it sells for on Discogs.

 

Why do you have such disdain for both the people who own used record stores and the people who shop in them?

I find this entire thread baffling. Used record stores stay in business because people buy records from them. I've got six different used record stores within a half-hour walk from my front door. (Looney Tunes, In Your Ear and Nuggets in Boston, Planet, Stereo Jack's and Cheapo in Cambridge.) If I walked into any of them this afternoon, there would be other customers there, and they'd be spending money. They're not "clueless collectors," they're people buying music. It's so weird that you don't understand that this is a thing that people enjoy doing and that allows this many stores to stay in business doing it.

 

I can't speak for anyone else, but my experience on this board has been that there's a contingent that either doesn't understand that younger people buy records from local shops, or distrusts their motives for doing so.

 

I don't like them because I find most of them overpriced . The ones that are not overpriced I don't like because it takes way too much time to dig through the crates. IMO it's a dyeing business model. A business should not survive based on the generosity of it's customers. Then they are running a charity, not a business.

 

Um.

Wow.

I didn't realize that the issue was that you don't understand the basic principles of capitalism.

A business offers goods in exchange for money.

A customer pays money in exchange for goods.

If the customer does not think the goods are of reasonable value for the amount of money, he or she does not complete the sale.

If this happens enough times, the business has to close.

This is literally Economics 101. I mean, I learned this in high school, and I did not go to a particularly good high school.

Again: wow.

 

No evidence they're dying here. My locals seem to all be doing very well, even given pandemic conditions. Maybe especially because of pandemic conditions, actually. Records are a high-value home entertainment proposition, especially among younger generations who grew up with technology and are valuing the tactile experience of pulling a record off a shelf and perusing the art and liner notes while it spins on a mechanical device. Maybe that seems precious to people who grew up when records were common, but there's a different valuing going on amongst a small but growing segment.

 

Earlier you implied customers should sell back their unwanted vinyl for pennies on the dollar because it's the right thing to do to support these stores. That is charity, not business.

 

Not really. I pay costs when I sell records online, including supplies, the value of my time, and possibly the opportunity cost of other activities I could be doing for more value. If I bring the records to a local store for sale, I'm choosing to value those costs, and to accept payment for the records, at amounts that I deem reasonable, or at least acceptable to me. I'm not giving my records away out of any sense of charity, but even if I were, I'd be making a calculation that my records weren't worth my time to sell online. And I can get whatever warm fuzzies that come from knowing I've contributed to the shared community experience that a record store inarguably serves as, notwithstanding its capitalist underpinnings. Yes, it's a place to buy and sell goods, but it's also a place to share information and enthusiasm with like-minded people.

That said, if I have records that are more valuable than my time and resources, I certainly sell them online to maximize my profit. Nothing wrong with either approach, or with a mixed approach.

 

No, that's still business. If you don't understand exchange, I'm certainly not going to explain markup to you.

I'm never going to post a damn thing on sale on Discogs/eBay/this forum because I know what my time is worth -- when I was a freelancer, I didn't get out of bed for less than $60/hr -- and my time is worth more than I'd get standing on line at the post office. Matter of fact, on those rare occasions when I do bring my cast-offs to one of my local stores, I drop 'em off as a donation rather than hang around waiting for an offer. Benefit to me #1: those records are out of my house. Benefit to me #2: at the stores where I do this, the owner routinely totals up my purchases and then takes 10-20% off the top because I'm a valued customer.

Now charity is when I do things like I did this weekend and put a shopping bag of about 150 CDs (80s-10s indie, 60s-70s classic rock/R&B, 40s-70s jazz) out on the sidewalk for the neighbors to scavenge. Although again, same benefit #1 applies: those CDs are out of my house.

 

The resurgence and cheap Crosley players has brought out a lot of folks who wish to have things they had when they were younger. I hear plenty of the same stories over and over: 'I had a bunch of stuff and got rid of it, now I want it again. If I had kept everything, I'd be a millionaire.'

Sure these people have heard of Ebay. A lot of the average persons have zero clue about Discogs. I'm not saying some classic rock title goes for crazy money. Obviously that depends what it is, condition, pressing, etc. An example would be Bob Seger. You may be able to find a clean Stranger In Town on Ebay for 10 bucks and pay shipping, wait on it, hope it sounds good... or you may run into one "in the wild" for about the same price and you're all good. You saw it, you inspected it, it's fine. If it's not, be nice to the clerk when you come back.

Another point about stores not selling everything on Discogs is: when I look up an album that's pretty common, I'm not going to look at each pressing. I see a bunch of titles ranging from 1 dollar to 5 dollars, I'm just going to price it between 6 and 8. I'm not going to spend all day finding out where that Phil Collins album was pressed hoping to get a dollar out of it online. Then there's all the filing and making sure you keep track of what's online. It's too difficult. If you're a store with a few employees, some of them aren't going to be as capable of remembering to take stuff down from being online and in the store at the same time.

 

A lot of them have heard of those places, well eBay anyway, but they would rather go to their local record store or flea market like they used to when they were young to replace a lot of the records they got rid off. Probably a decent day out for them as well