On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
If you decline to sell a thing for an easy 1300, doesn't that mean you value it at 1300 or more?
It's burning $5 in gas and $20 in time to go to a store further away and save $25 on a sale item. And then proudly bragging "I'm not like those idiots who pay full price!"
OP didn't find a record...he found a $1300 arbitrage, then decided to spend the proceeds on the record by keeping it.
In other words, this is why selling stuff to consumers is a nightmare.
You have to trick them into believing they "won one over" on everybody else, via discounting and promotions, no matter if ultimately they're the ones losing by spending hours of their time jumping through hoops on a product that they legitimately value at full price.
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
someone, above: > believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I'm going to quote myself, paraphrased, because i forget the exact phrasing.
"All else equal, which tastes better: ice cream you've paid for; or ice cream that cost you nothing?"
edit: i didn't intend the above to be snark, even though it may read that way.
I mean it's helped by the fact that I can only realistically drive it like 7-8 months out of each year, and it's my fun car, not a commuter. As much as I'd love to drive for fun every day that's just not feasible, lol. That said it's resale value has never once entered my mind. I'm waiting until the loan is paid off at which point I'm planning several modifications to get more power out of it, and probably a lambo-door-hinge kit.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here in your thinking. The first one is that you can just randomly turn around and sell that record for $1300. Hitting those peaks usually only happens with in person sales or amongst collectors who know each other well. It’s incredibly expensive to get to that point and requires thousands of hours of work. For a normal person without extensive contacts, it’s still a lot of leg work for a fraction of that price. That might yield maybe $30 an hour.
Some people value their time higher than that; it’s really not that deep.