Been trolling ebay for a while now - years, really - trying to track down some videos from a series. My goal was to get a bunch of the earlier entries and, as a fun exercise/hobby since they didn't exist on DVD and no good digital transfers exist, transfer them myself and do some restoration on them - an unofficial "digital remaster".

These things always sold for cheap - like between $10 and $30 each - but only showed up on the market maybe a couple times a year. Then earlier this year someone posted a set of like 4 or 5 that after originally failing to sell at maybe $125 eventually went for $100. And then this is where it gets weird.

I'm guessing ebay recommended that selling price to the next guy... who was only selling a single tape. So this idiot, not knowing what he's doing, lists a single tape for $100 - AND THEN A BIGGER IDIOT PAID FOR IT. Next thing I know a bunch of these pop out of the woodwork, each listing for $90+, and each selling, often times only to be flipped and resold... often seemingly to other sellers who would go on to do the same thing.

So now here I am, flustered that I can't do my project because I refuse to contribute to this greedy circlejerk and pay more than what these tapes are actually worth and perpetuate the effed up pricing. I'm curious to know if anyone else is seeing this kind of thing and what their take on it is - is this artificial inflation happening all across the VHS market? Can we expect it to end at some point?

-- merged --

To clarify this part here: The ones that do sell are flipped and resold. Most just sit and get relisted over and over again, at the same exact overpriced cost, and none of the sellers are open to lowering their price to align with actual market value - it's like they're hellbent on making a profit or at least recouping their loss if they overpaid for it themselves.

Ugh. I'm well aware that I could do the same thing - buy it and flip it - I'm not hurting for cash. But it's just mind-bending seeing the market explode like this in real time.

This goes both ways, for VHS tapes. Any collectible, really.

Example: I have a rare movie release. It was only available to the rental market, in select European countries, in 1986. About 25 years ago, late 90s, I got a copy, at least $100 at that time. I've converted it multiple times (DVD, lossless, H.264 deinterlaced), but it had some tape-based boogers that could not restore out perfectly. This tape was the reason I bought my first PAL VCR. About 5 years ago, late 2010s, another copy appeared, for $20. The person did not know what he/she had, located in one of those European countries, and all movies were the same price, from what appeared to be a video store inventory being liquidated. It had other issues, but all my boogers were fixed, two copies made perfect digital version. Time to sell the tapes! So I put both up for current fair market price. I'd get people contacting me, stating it was only $20 on eBay because some random "eBay archive" sites showed the old price from many years ago, and I need to lower my price. Ridiculous. For $20, they'll stay mine.

(The video is available on Youtube now, but it's a really old conversion, from a pre-Youtube era, heavily compressed unwatchable garbage. The rare movie is actually a remix [sort of] of footage from other movies, and some have attempted reconstructions, but it's just not the same, still missing footage, alterations. The recon job also has many video flaws that make it a blurry mess.)

This happens all the time in the collectible action figure market. Prices gets absurd in both directions, and somebody always complains. If you think politics are toxic cesspools online, join a Marvel Legends or Star Wars vintage figures group on Facebook.

This "circlejerk" of mispricing is also what made eBay suck for video gear. Many years ago, I could acquire a semi-decent VCR that needed work, for $225 or so. Junk cost less. Put in parts (junk deck = donor), labor, time, sell it for at least $500. The MSRP was about $500, and my reconditioning put it back to like-new shape. But then it turned to a point where people now think damaged non-functional irreparable VCRs are worth $250 minimum, and barely passable quality decks (functional, but with motor issues, gear issues, oxide shed inside, etc) are at least double or triple that. How can prices of quality decks ever get below $1k again? Because that's what I'm having to now charge. And the work is getting tougher, making deck refurbs less fun, and a time-suck.

It used to be a case of VCR users selling their decks. Now it's just recyclers (resellers) flipping crap. It gets listed and re-listed. Sometimes you'll see flipper buyers buying and flipping unseen, especially beware of the Houston VCR scammer.

As per recent threads, TBC-1000 sellers have knowingly been selling "for parts or repair" units, trying to pass the buck on their own bad buys.
See https://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/new...buy-parts.html
As much as I warn others, they just can't help themselves. "Gee George, I can save lots of money!" ... and then they find out they lost lots of money instead. Maybe I should sell magic beans instead of refurb'd video gear? :screwy:

To clarify, eBay is not my preferred source of gear, but even off-eBay is affected by the on-eBay pricing (not even sold, but "for sale" that never sells). That makes negotiations tougher, because they think their turd is a brick of gold. I really hate it when I have to deal with liquidator 3rd parties, middleman for a "telephone game", and they never know anything about the items (and probably couldn't even a set a VCR clock).

In the past 2 years, I've had more deals fall apart than in all prior years. It's just not feasible what they wanted. At least once, the person came back some months later, hoping I was still interested in buying, after failing to find anybody for his absurd pricing. However, he had sold a few pieces, and somehow thought I'd still be interested at the same pricing. Uh, no. I passed, still too costly for the now-picked-over lot.

The situations that really piss me off is when we negotiate fairly ... THEN the person looks at eBay, and comes back with an insane counter AFTER we agreed on a price. I've actually blocked more than one person for this, they can no longer email or PM me, and one was banned from here for doing it to another member.

Do you think it may have something to do with the current state of the economy? It just seems COVID on everything has been in a swing and slowly trying to correct but fluxing itself constantly. Granted, it probably will not be the same for a while because of inflation/money printing. It's hard to tell what causes what. I had a holy grail figure I always wanted and there were never any listings in the past 4 years besides 1 overpriced guy from Cyprus selling the item for like 15x the original MSRP price, an item that has gone up naturally, but not by that much, but eventually some listings trickled in all of a sudden and the price seemed to mellow out. I think these things are hard to predict. You can always message and haggle it down with an offer, but you know how that goes. In the end, I think it's pretty normal and we all have a story about something like this.

I think a big factor, nowadays especially, is nostalgia value. Since covid theres been a big uptick in people wanting to relive late 90s early 2000s so then you get people buying stuff for decent prices then falsely pricing them for 3x the actual value. Which is really annoying, I USED to find some old games for 20 max, now I can only find them for 60.

A collectible seller does not buy an item for $100 and sell it for $90, only ebay makes money that way. True collectors buy things when they are dirt cheap, hold onto them for years and sell them for a reasonable price based on the true value of the item at the time it was sold. that's how it works. These flippers you see on ebay are just mudding the waters and most of the time they lose their ass because they are stupid and greedy. That leaves the victims who have nostalgic feelings to buy for those items at outrageous prices.

I bought a lot of gear in the last few years due to nostalgia at prices that made sense but I don't do it anymore because of these idiots who go to state auctions, flea markets and dumpsters and want to be millionaires overnight.

ah sorry didn't mean to make it seem like I was bashing collectible sellers, i was referring to those who don't know anything and just wanted to make a profit off others nostalgia. You a said it a lot clearer than I did so I agree with you

No.

It's actually not impossible to see what's what, it's just complex, slow-moving. You have to go back to the mid and late 2010s to see the data unfold, it wasn't just the pandemic. The pandemic was just the tipping of the scale, and the money printing kicked the scale over. On this very forum, I voiced my concerns about debt leveraged free money in 2018 (0 interest, then 2017 tax cuts), with a "sugar high" stock market in '17-19. March/April/May 2020 was a healthy economic reset (even if due to bad reasons), but then it went parabolic stupid with QE for far too long in back half of '20 and all of 2021. Now we require a recession to reset. But that reset hasn't happened yet, aside from (mostly food/rent) inflation, stocks/bonds revaluing, and just a hint of falling GDP and economic earnings. I don't expect actual pullbacks in spending until sometime in 2023, ie nothing being discussed here is really affected by the still-unfolding economics.

Curious. Which one? :)

People on social media scream and howl at this fact. "OMG, he made money reselling a toy for 5/10/20/whatever years ago! Attention all keyboard warriors: let's harass him!"

If next year brings economic pain, collectibles (the most non-essential of non-essentials) may reprice lower due to needing cash. Fire sale mentality. But the question is: will you have money to buy it? This is how I scored a lot of my vintage collections back in the early 2000s. (When '08-09 hit, I didn't have any money either. So I've been on both sides of it.)

It's a personal holy grail, so don't get too excited but it was the Halo 2 Anniversary Play Arts Kai.