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Best find of summer 2020 (and my life?)


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Felt like sharing since I just read a post that user Zombi shared about finding a wild Samson in a lot...earlier this summer I developed an email contact for a guy who owned a small chain of local video rental stores in the northwest Chicago suburbs...I asked him if he had video games still and he said nope they are all gone, but to come on by anyway he has tons of stuff.  I also collect VHS too so I mainly went to check out his stash of that (and boy howdy that was a juicy stash)...when I was there I again asked, "So no games huh?  Old Nintendo or Sega etc?"  "He then says, oh yeah there is a small box of Nintendo games still, and I have some Sega Genesis & Sega CD games too."  Ok, so he is saying something completely different than the firm no he gave through email, whatever, let's roll with it...he grabs a box of NES games and I pop it open, BAM, eyes hone in on the blue label of that very rare and expensive Taito sequel, POWER BLADE 2.  "How much on the games?" I ask....."I used to sell them for $5 a piece up at the 7 Mile Fair (nearby Wisconsin Flea Market over the Illinois border) back in the day, so $5 each is fine."......SCORE.  Pics below.  I cherry picked anything worth $10 or more from that box, including the boxed Contra that unfortunately looked like someone stomped on it several times.  But wait it gets better...

The Sega CD lot was decent too actually, also $5 a piece.  I'll post that pic below as well, but the cherry on top of all of this was the random empty box we grabbed to put all the Sega CD games in (which I ended up later selling for $1,000 on eBay)...it was a box for a Donkey Kong 64 press kit that the guy said he got when he managed a KayBee Toys in the 90s.  That sealed the deal on making it the best find of my life overall to date.  Kept a few of the Sega CD games, the Power Blade 2, and upgraded a few of my other NES games as well...plus severely beefed up the VHS horror collection and made a shitload of money selling off doubles in that dept, plus other things I got from him like the MOUNTAIN of game consoles he had strewn about in his hoarded mess of a storage unit (which he also priced at $5 a piece).  Again, this guy had TONS of game stuff so I don't know if he just didn't realize it in his stash at first or was lying about it to begin with for no apparent reason.  Either way I made out big-time.

Funny thing is, since he initially told me he didn't have any games through email I kind of blew off the lead for a whole month or so since I was under the impression it was an hour drive out from the city to basically go look at VHS tapes.  One day I was severely bored during the quarantine and said fuck it I'll follow-up and go drive out because I have literally nothing better to do.  So, so glad I did...I eventually made two more visits to comb over everything thoroughly which brought lots of more goodies but nothing as incredible as this first visit.  Needles to say I was FREAKING OUT trying to keep my cool the first time there.

Here are links to the hauls from every visit, on my Instagram, with total price paid on each visit:

Round 1:

Round 2:

Round 3:

 

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Edited by 8bitsupremacy
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10 minutes ago, Gloves said:

Why should he have?

I should make it clear that I'm not saying he had to, nor is he a bad person, not everyone does things the way I would do them. I would just be incredibly embarrassed to admit to treating someone like that. I also have never bought something with the intention of just selling it, I don't see the point. I always tell the person I can help them get rid of the items if they want to split it.

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Administrator · Posted
4 minutes ago, Code Monkey said:

I should make it clear that I'm not saying he had to, nor is he a bad person, not everyone does things the way I would do them. I would just be incredibly embarrassed to admit to treating someone like that. I also have never bought something with the intention of just selling it, I don't see the point. I always tell the person I can help them get rid of the items if they want to split it.

It's the "why didn't you" that came off that way, really. Implies he should have. 

The point of buying something to sell is profit. To my knowledge this guy isn't OPs friend or anything. As they say, a fool and his money. 

The seller clearly didn't care much about getting top dollar or they'd have done even a 5 minute bout of research into current prices. I'm sure he just wanted the space and didn't care about the hassle of selling pieces individually, and was happy to see a bunch of it just gone. 

I've given away lots of stuff, I don't expect or want everyone I give a good deal to to be like "you can get more for this" I typically just want shit gone to make space in my home. 

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42 minutes ago, jonebone said:

Why didn't you just congratulate someone on their find instead of posting some passive aggressive comment?

I often have trouble understanding society and why people do certain things so I always find it's easiest to ask so I can understand better. That way I know for next time I see similar behaviour.

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I knew that comment was coming.  OP is under no obligation to tell the seller his stuff is worth more and go out of his way to help him sell it.  The seller has access to the exact same information that the OP has access to.  The seller chose not to research the items he was selling.  He chose the easy way to sell stuff and in turn made less money because of it.  The seller still made a decent amount of money for almost zero effort.  He could have sold that stuff for a lot more, but he would have had to put in a much larger effort to do so.    

Congrats OP on the great find.  Hopefully this thread doesn't turn into a shit show that sours your great experience.  

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LOL at the guy saying I should have helped him sell his stuff proper.  I walked into a hoarded mess of stuff and got disgustingly dirty digging for hours multiple times to produce all of this, based on HIS suggested pricing and HIM saying he wanted me to take as much as I could.  There was zero haggle, and we did exact counts of everything to total it all up.  The guy even told me straight up, "I know I can sell all this crap for much more but I just want it gone, I don't have the time for it and have been trying to convince myself for years now I'd get around it to sorting it all, etc."   He was pumped on all the newly freed up space and thanked me plenty by the third visit because it gave him some semblance of focus to get the rest of the storage organized better.  When I was driving away the third time and we parted ways he wished me luck and said, "I hope you make a ton of money off all that, should keep ya busy for a while eh!?"

I'd also like to add that on my second visit the guy expressed regret on selling me one of the Sega CD games, because he had a Sega CD still and would occasionally play...it was Double Switch...so I brought it with me on the third visit and gave it back to him.  He was pumped.

Edited by 8bitsupremacy
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1 hour ago, A_Feisty_Pickle said:

Nice find! I've got the DK64 press kit VHS and banana keychain, but missing the majority of it.  

Yeah isn't there a plush banana too?  I don't collect for n64 at all so I didn't have a desire to keep it.  Had it been some rare NES promo thing I would have been all over it.  When I first noticed the box I just thought hey that looks weird, never seen one of those, then later when I got home I started researching it and realized what I had stumbled upon.

Edited by 8bitsupremacy
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I have a haul I'm going to post soon when I have it in hand (got like $300+ worth of GBA games for about $180) and the seller literally told me "You could sell two of these games for more than what I'm charging." Sometimes people seriously don't want to go through the effort to maximize their profit, they just want to unload. You could turn around and tell them "hey I made $XX amount in profit off what you sold me" and they'll just be like "cool, good for you." 

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4 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

I have a haul I'm going to post soon when I have it in hand (got like $300+ worth of GBA games for about $180) and the seller literally told me "You could sell two of these games for more than what I'm charging." Sometimes people seriously don't want to go through the effort to maximize their profit, they just want to unload. You could turn around and tell them "hey I made $XX amount in profit off what you sold me" and they'll just be like "cool, good for you." 

Precisely.  This guy was definitely one of those guys.  He had other guys coming through after me too to buy leftover arcade stuff/pinball machines he had as well (a world I don't know too much about).  Had I tipped my hat and said, "no thank you sir, your prices are far far too low, gonna have to pass so I'm not morally judged by some stranger on a message board a few months from now," I would have lost out big-time to one of the other potential buyers.

Edited by 8bitsupremacy
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4 hours ago, Murray said:

I’ll take one of those Gamecube’s off of your hands if you are looking to sell. 

All the consoles are gone at this point.  This find was about two months old and I basically spent my summer sorting and selling all that stuff.  Since I became suddenly unemployed from Covid-19 layoffs I had nothing but free time to dedicate to properly handling the lot.

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1 hour ago, 8bitsupremacy said:

All the consoles are gone at this point.  This find was about two months old and I basically spent my summer sorting and selling all that stuff.  Since I became suddenly unemployed from Covid-19 layoffs I had nothing but free time to dedicate to properly handling the lot.

No worries. Hope things are going ok! 

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Administrator · Posted
1 hour ago, 8bitsupremacy said:

 Since I became suddenly unemployed from Covid-19 layoffs I had nothing but free time to dedicate to properly handling the lot.

Definitely a good time to have stumbled across that stuff then!

Did they have writing on them too or just the rental stickers?

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15 minutes ago, captmorgandrinker said:

Definitely a good time to have stumbled across that stuff then!

Did they have writing on them too or just the rental stickers?

The NES games had stickers, which I love for nostalgic purposes and as a reminder of where it came from.  Sega CD has sharpie writing on the back of each manual and tray (rental codes).  All VHS had stickers with his old store name on them.  The consoles were all devoid of writing or stickers.  He said he was also a garage sale/storage locker picker guy a few years ago but just kept acquiring and not selling stuff.  A lot of the consoles were broken but I want to say 75% of them were ace with no tinkering needed.

Edited by 8bitsupremacy
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