I sometimes feel guilty! Is there anyone that feels the same way?

[theekman]

You should know what your selling. With the internet its not hard to find out what something is worth.

Unless its an old timer i wouldnt feel bad,

 

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[MRBeyer]

I put honesty in all I do

I always make sure I mention what it is I am looking at. Usually it is a "can I see that silver ring" or "mind if I look at the gold necklace over there?" I also let the seller set the price. If it is not realistic then I haggle. Often I have found myself paying more than the price they have posted. However, I let them learn from intentional acts of ignorance. I bought some sterling jewelry from a college girl at a yard sale. Her dad was there and I looked at him when she answered my question as to why she was selling her jewelry so cheap. She said it was old, tarnished, and she wanted some new cleaner jewelry. Her dad and I made eye contact, he shrugged, I bought her out. Sometimes they have to learn the hard way.Another time at a thrift store I asked about the price on a gold necklace as it was very poorly marked. The sales person stated the price was 8.95. I verified the price with the lady a second time, then bought the $300 necklace at the price she stated. Another time I took the time at a charitable thrift store and educated the ladies running it on what they had and pointed out that they were selling way below a good thrift store value for gold and silver. Their prices went up a bit but ever since I can get a good deal when I go in there and their good cause is still well supported.

 

[Iron Patch]

You should know what your selling. With the internet its not hard to find out what something is worth.

Unless its an old timer i wouldnt feel bad,

Not really. There's not many items that have more info. out there than coins, yet lots of people don't have a clue how to value them... and that includes many people on this forum who both dig them and have an interest in them. So when you start talking about things that don't even have books with the values, or a large number of sales online, no way is it a snap for the average person to always figure out the value.

 

[insontis]

So far I've only purchased "treasures" from thrift stores and eBay. On eBay I pay more than a fair price & the only piece I've purchased of high value at a thrift store I plan on donating a portion of the profit back. My treasure fever hit after the garage sale season last year so its madness has not yet been released on the good standing citizens of my community. I suppose my current views are this: if they didn't price it, offer a fair price for both them & myself. If they did price it and it's super low, I may offer more for it or purchase some other items to balance it out better. A lot of people carry a scale to garage sales when purchasing precious metals and they seem to offer a fair price per gram. It's up to the seller to accept or decline. I'm not out looking to take advantage of people, but I am looking to make a profit. We can hope a happy medium is reached for the buyer and seller. We must assume, however, that if they are openly selling the items that they are satisfied with the price they have set.

 

[jamey]

i would hope that sometimes good things happen too good people,to keep them going just to keep on doing good things

 

[trdhrdr007]

I see people coming in on both sides of the question of whether or not people should make the effort to gain the knowledge to know what their items are worth. I don't see how that is an issue. There is a certain amount of time/effort that goes into realizing the best price for a good or service. Anyone that puts in the effort will get the highest price. If you don't put in the time/effort you don't get full value.

Someone that put in the time/effort to gain the knowledge to be a plumber, computer tech, etc doesn't feel guilty when they charge someone $100 for a small job that takes almost no time & little knowledge.....& retailers don't have any problem with buying items at wholesale prices to resell at retail. Why anyone would feel guilty for working their butt off to gain specialized knowledge in order to make a profit is beyond me.

 

[Tallone]

Bottom line for me is this: If both parties are willing to make the deal then nobody should feel guilty. Some of the personal stories sellers tell are heart-breaking and, I'm sure, many of them are true. I also have encountered outright liars who will say anything to try to get a better price. In most cases there is no way to tell truth from fiction.

The discussion above brings to mind a situation I encountered a couple of years ago that still gets to me every time I think about it. I saw a Craigslist ad for an estate sale by appointment. I called and arranged a time to visit. My wife and I went. A very nice guy in his 40s was selling off the contents of a house. For some reason, strangers often pour out their personal stories to my wife without her even asking. I guess she just has a kindly face and demeanor that put people at ease. Anyway, this guy tells her his story. The house belonged to his parents. His mother died suddenly many years before while in her early 60s and left behind an invalid husband and her only son. It was the son we were dealing with. Turns out both my wife and I knew the mother when we were students at the local university. She worked in the Department office where we were graduate students. Lovely lady who we both had very fond memories of.

After his mother's death, the son spent 10 years caring for his invalid father (who had been severely injured in a car crash) before he passed away. He lost the house to a neighbor when the county sold it at a tax sale. The son had been a stellar student and an eagle scout (we saw the evidence of this in the things he was selling) and appeared to have a very bright future. He had been married and, according to him, his wife had tried to help out as best she could even after they divorced but eventually gave up and moved on. Now he was losing his home and selling off all his possessions. I couldn't help but wonder what happened. Obviously, he had a difficult situation to deal with but it seemed like he should have been able to manage it. We paid him $100 for a group of things. He was happy with that. And, yes, we did re-sell much of it and made a couple of hundred dollars on the deal.

Here is the kicker... after we made our deal and were about to leave, the guy asked if we would give him a ride into town. He had no transportation - not even a bicycle. The town was a couple of miles away in the opposite direction from where we were headed but we agreed to give him a lift. He asked us to take him to a small shopping center. We did and he asked us to wait and give him a ride back to his house after he did a quick errand. His "errand" was to go into a liquor store and use the money we just gave him to by a half gallon jug of whiskey. I still don't know what to make of all this. Is this guy a raging alcoholic? I don't know. Maybe he bought the liquor as a one time thing to blunt the pain of losing everything he had in life. Or maybe this once promising young man become an alcoholic before circumstances began to spiral downward and the alcohol just made things much, much worse. I have no way of knowing and never will have the answer to that question. All I know is that I felt like the money we paid him wound up doing more harm than good.

 

[Iron Patch]

Bottom line for me is this: If both parties are willing to make the deal then nobody should feel guilty. Some of the personal stories sellers tell are heart-breaking and, I'm sure, many of them are true. I also have encountered outright liars who will say anything to try to get a better price. In most cases there is no way to tell truth from fiction.

The discussion above brings to mind a situation I encountered a couple of years ago that still gets to me every time I think about it. I saw a Craigslist ad for an estate sale by appointment. I called and arranged a time to visit. My wife and I went. A very nice guy in his 40s was selling off the contents of a house. For some reason, strangers often pour out their personal stories to my wife without her even asking. I guess she just has a kindly face and demeanor that put people at ease. Anyway, this guy tells her his story. The house belonged to his parents. His mother died suddenly many years before while in her early 60s and left behind an invalid husband and her only son. It was the son we were dealing with. Turns out both my wife and I knew the mother when we were students at the local university. She worked in the Department office where we were graduate students. Lovely lady who we both had very fond memories of.

After his mother's death, the son spent 10 years caring for his invalid father (who had been severely injured in a car crash) before he passed away. He lost the house to a neighbor when the county sold it at a tax sale. The son had been a stellar student and an eagle scout (we saw the evidence of this in the things he was selling) and appeared to have a very bright future. He had been married and, according to him, his wife had tried to help out as best she could even after they divorced but eventually gave up and moved on. Now he was losing his home and selling off all his possessions. I couldn't help but wonder what happened. Obviously, he had a difficult situation to deal with but it seemed like he should have been able to manage it. We paid him $100 for a group of things. He was happy with that. And, yes, we did re-sell much of it and made a couple of hundred dollars on the deal.

Here is the kicker... after we made our deal and were about to leave, the guy asked if we would give him a ride into town. He had no transportation - not even a bicycle. The town was a couple of miles away in the opposite direction from where we were headed but we agreed to give him a lift. He asked us to take him to a small shopping center. We did and he asked us to wait and give him a ride back to his house after he did a quick errand. His "errand" was to go into a liquor store and use the money we just gave him to by a half gallon jug of whiskey. I still don't know what to make of all this. Is this guy a raging alcoholic? I don't know. Maybe he bought the liquor as a one time thing to blunt the pain of losing everything he had in life. Or maybe this once promising young man become an alcoholic before circumstances began to spiral downward and the alcohol just made things much, much worse. I have no way of knowing and never will have the answer to that question. All I know is that I felt like the money we paid him wound up doing more harm than good.

Given that story I would not judge him.

 

[centfladigger]

I have a great job but it is the most depressing because I do care. I deal with these foreclosures, doing the inspections on occupied homes for the banks and inspecting the vacant homes, and have my crews doing the cleanouts. I have changed the locks and walked inside homes before that you would swear they were just out for the day and would be returning. I have seen about 15 vacant homes were the wifes wedding dress was left hanging in the closet, they got a divorce, I see where people have written notes on the wall of a house stating their love for the place and to whomever bought it to please take care of it. Find a few a year where they were cussing out Wells Fargo or some other banks written on walls.
Each time I step into a vacant home , it is just me in this vacant house an I can "read the sign" so to speak . Since we are in Florida I find many that were older retirees from up north and the kids just want the house sold and money sent to them, I have to clean this stuff out, it ALL GOES INTO A DUMPSTER. Most is garbage but I have found vintage jewelry dated from the 1920`s left behind, you name it I have probably found it. It is through dealing with this stuff and being on this site for a few years that I have increased my knowledge of what could be good or what should go into the dumpsters.
People leave behind family photo albums baby albums, I found the other day a box with a young mans picture as a kid and then his Marine Corps picture and then his death notice of when he was killed in Vietnam, I was in his dads house who died and family got what they wanted but left that behind.
I see yard sales at houses I do occupancy inspections on knowing they are more than likely fighting a losing battle, they just don't know it yet and then one day the house is vacant, I tag it as such and eventually get the order for a lock change and later a cleanout. I do find a lot of in date canned goods in the vacant houses and I do gather those up and pass them on those families I know are in need and in Foreclosure and glad it doesn't go to waste. I could go on for hours like this but y`all get the idea. I recently had a yard sale and did very good , but I will say I gave a lot of stuff away to people I felt like giving it to. A kid bought a sealed numbered and graded BEn Rothlesburger rookie card from me that I found. I asked $20 for it( I found a stack of 15 of them) his dad did not want to give him mnoney for it but finally he did, I went inside and gave the kid a unopened box of card I found dated 1990. he loved it

then walk into a house like this and wonder why am I still doing this crap?

 

[dumpsterdiver]

You know that friend you loan $20 bucks to and never get it back. And you think I will never give that fool $20 bucks again. Well eventually those people run out of friends. Then they sell stuff.

 

[tamaco]

i do sometimes feel guilty, but then am reminded willing sellers and willing buyers. i usually never haggle, but i'm never 100% sure of what i've purchased. sometimes i win, sometimes i lose .

 

[apush]

I buy storage lockers--well, a total of 3 thus far. In my first locker, I found at several photo albums and just thrown them away in the trash. It was sad, but I could not keep them.

I did not know, at the time, the protocol of returning personal items back to the storage company. About a week after I bought my first unit, a lady from the storage company called me and asked if I had found any photo albums. The original owner of the unit had requested that the buyer return them. If I would have know that I was "suppose" to have returned them, I would have been more than happy to. I do so now. Lesson learned and good Karma.
apush

 

[storageauctionaddict]

Recently we won a unit for $25. We won 4 in that facility and the next day while cleaning them out the owner of the $25 locker returned to pay her bill, not knowing that her belongings had legally been turned over to us. We had not gone through her locker yet and she paid $400 to us - much, much less than she owed on the unit - and took all her things out herself.

I felt sort of bad for her but in the end we saved her several hundred dollars that she would have had to pay to the facility otherwise. And, she offered up that amount of money herself, so it must have been worthwhile to her. I think everybody won. We got all 4 lockers for $137 that day so we were up $263 before we even removed one item. And we had 3 more lockers to sift through, which have all proved very profitable.

 

[jerseyben]

Recently we won a unit for $25. We won 4 in that facility and the next day while cleaning them out the owner of the $25 locker returned to pay her bill, not knowing that her belongings had legally been turned over to us. We had not gone through her locker yet and she paid $400 to us - much, much less than she owed on the unit - and took all her things out herself. I felt sort of bad for her but in the end we saved her several hundred dollars that she would have had to pay to the facility otherwise. And, she offered up that amount of money herself, so it must have been worthwhile to her. I think everybody won. We got all 4 lockers for $137 that day so we were up $263 before we even removed one item. And we had 3 more lockers to sift through, which have all proved very profitable.

Sounds like a win-win scenario to me.

 

[SilverForBrains]

At least you're not taking advantage of people and passing yourself off as a charity like some thrift stores I know!

 

[batcap]

We all have to live with our own conscience. What some are doing is comparing, and sometimes judging, their conscience to another person's. Exactly what good comes from that? You must do what your inner guide tells you to, or you suffer the consequences.
Do you want to take a vow of poverty? What would happen if everyone did? Do you want to enforce your sense of what is right and wrong on everyone? Just where did God say "Thou shalt not turn a profit?"
If you think you are a good person that can be of benefit to the people around you, then take advantage of the treasures that you find.
If you feel that you are in desperate circumstances and you need to grasp and claw every straw, you too should take advantage of the treasures you find.
Who can make better use of the treasures you find than you?
WE ARE TREASURE HUNTERS . . .sometimes we find treasure.

 

[releventchair]

We are a people of "stuff".
I think it was Henry David Thoreau mentioning some thing like. .. I saw an immigrant staggering under his load of all he owned and felt sorry for him not because that was all he owned but because he owned all that.
Here,s hoping most folks who,s storage units contents get pulled from them had all ready found they could get by without their contents value. For the cost of what they lost they learned something though. More than happy memories teach maybe.
Hey Sgt. I used to live next to the fire barn there. I,d give ya 500.00 for the cub. l.o.l..