Quote Originally Posted by SIR.LONDONCLEANLILY View Post
I am not going to get into a pissing match about this but I must defend myself. I buy VINYL (thanks to THAT GUY) all the time at inflated prices because I didn't catch it when I should have. When I do so I look around at various places and try and get the best price! In this case my auction started fairly low compared to what they have been selling for! It was so reasonable that SOMEONE bought it! OMG!!!!! Seriously, Its not like I just walked down the street and bought them either. I drove to 3 different locations all over the metroplex and probably spent $20 in gas doing so (not to mention the cheeseburger and fries I bought to sustain living that day). I may have paid $18.99 plus tax at the store but I still had other cost in acquiring the item. This is what some scholarly folks would call "BASIC ECONOMICS". I understand that limited edition items are going to go up in price! Why can't you? I would LOVE to have one of the limited edition Coachella V is for Vagina but I am not writing letters to people on ebay until they mark it down for me. I am just sitting around waiting for one that is in my price range. Why not try that?
For the record, while I understand the economics of limited quantity releases, I've always had a very strict anti-scalping stance when it comes to ticket sales on this board. There's an increasingly grey area in respect to the marketplace area of the forum, where older NIN & related stuff is offered up for sale at prices that are obviously multiples of the original cost. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone on ETS buy multiple copies of a new release and try to sell them within this community for much more than face value + shipping, particularly when there are people who specifically asked for other members of the forum fortunate enough to get extra copies if they would help get copies where they're harder to find.

Personally, I find it a little bit distasteful, but that's just my own view on pricing things out. I'm the guy who spends a lot of money on hard to find stuff so that I can share it freely on the internet. And even the rarest stuff I've found, when I resell it, I don't sell it for a dime more than I paid for it. But then everyone's in different situations, financially, and I'm lucky that I can make the decisions that I make, in that regard. It doesn't make me a better person, it's just different. When I do want to sell something at a price that 'the market' supports, I put it up on eBay for $0.99 and let it do whatever it wants. I've definitely bought music equipment cheap and sold for a profit... but never to friends. Friends get it for less than I paid for it.

Ultimately, I think that the topic of your extra copies that you were selling at extra markup should just be dropped - that is to say, don't really bring that up here. Sell them elsewhere, and don't mention it on ETS, or just deal privately here. That way you don't need to justify yourself. I know you were excited when you found copies that you had trouble finding before, and glad to have found the opportunity you did. Some people didn't take well to that, and it's not the end of the world, but here we are.