How nuts am I? and selling stuff.

[Anonymous]

I just drove 8 hours in a rental car up and down a couple mountain passes on the possibility that the seller of an obsolete 12 year old tv would come down from being way over-priced. I look at it. All seems fine. Then we talk money as we touched on through a phone call. Thus the source of that possibility.  I'm not going to offer sight-unseen when the price is starting out too high. If a seller asks well below then it would sell in a minute. Sight-unseen even. But if they ask too high then it languishes. This one languished. I offered what I believed to be a generous well above fair market value price. He wouldn't budge. I couldn't reasonably justify his price. He wouldn't move. Dead-locked. So I drove the 8 hours back empty-handed.

How nuts am I? 🙂

There are two kinds of private sellers:

1. Want to sell it. Price it whatever with an eye to a reasonable fair market value. Some one offers something that you can live with just so its sold.

2. Want to see what they can get while being fine enough to just keep it so not taking much of any offers even if fair market value or more. And so just doesn't sell it.

#1 works for both parties. #2 sucks for the buyer.

[Anonymous]

Jeez. See that pill bottle labeled Chill? Take one.

[CFPartDeux]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

 @CFPartDeux : If you get it about plasma then you would get it even for free.

---

No, YOU would get it..... for 16 hrs. driving, and a car rental, I WOULDN'T, especially for something that's 12 yrs. old, and could easily crap out the next day. 👎

[Anonymous]

 @Korth : All entirely likely. Maybe he didn't bet on my walking away empty handed AFTER putting out that time and cost. But I'm not going to make an offer sight unseen. I would if the price was fair. But then it would have long since been sold to someone else. We talked a little about price on the phone. Nothing final. I said where I could probably get to. He seemed to indicate maybe something less than asking. I'm thinking maybe we'd find something in between. But no.

So yes I took the gamble. Alas. I lost. He keeps what he already has. I got nothing to show for the time and cost.

[Korth]

@Anonymous 

Don't feel bad about hunting for obsolete appliances.

I'm always on the lookout for little old TVs - 8" or smaller, fast-response monochrome CRT - not the fancy big once-expensive colourful ones. To use for display parts when building or repairing analog instruments.

They haven't been manufactured in decades, they're getting impossible to find. Although a few people (like this fellow) actually make neo-retro tubes by hand.

Though I doubt I would spend hours driving to an unfinished deal (unless I was already driving towards the area for some other reason). Vendors really have no excuses in this age of smartphone cameras and emails.

I'm guessing you made the mistake of letting the vendor know how much time and effort you'd put into showing up - which demonstrates how much you wanted to buy the item, how much value you put into acquiring it, so of course the seller's price wouldn't budge. You were hoping you'd be able to haggle the price by negotiating face-to-face, the seller was hoping you'd have to take the higher price because otherwise all that driving around would be an unhappy waste. All avoidable if you'd both agreed on a price before you set out.

[Jovi]

@Anonymous 

Not nuts at all!   I love a good road trip, don’t you?  It’s too bad it wasn’t fruitful though, that would have been icing on the cake 🙂

If I had said TV, I would give it you ... I stopped TV ages ago. 

[Anonymous]

 @CFPartDeux : If you get it about plasma then you would get it even for free.

Private sellers also don't want to go to the hassle of shipping. The buyer (me anyway) would rather set eyes on the thing too. I asked the guy that if he changes his mind, I have family there and they could pick it up and hold it for me. I'm not holding my breath.

I now wonder if seeing some nutbar drive 8 hours to not pay his too-high asking price that he sees even more value in keeping it.

We all have our price for anything. He should have said firm. That way there's isn't any room for cajoling down. This is the price. If you want it, pay it. If not, I'll just keep it anyway. But he didn't. He seemed to leave room on the phone for something lower than asking. I had gambled on his finding more room with me standing in front of him. But he didn't want to just sell it. He wanted to sell it at his price. Which is way too high. But that's his price. These kinds of sellers think it's worth it to sell high. Of course it is. So it is with everybody. But then it doesn't sell. So you don't actually want to sell it in the end unless it's at your own personal worth it price.

I'm fine with fair. I'm fine with more than fair in some cases. Obviously I'm fine with getting a steal. But I WILL walk away if too unjustifiably over-priced merely because that's the price that's worth it to him to let it go.

So it doesn't sell. And he sits on it or maybe marginally enjoys it just to be stubborn at all those low-ball offers of what are actually fair market value or more. And it steadily reduces in value the longer he sits on it.

Obviously if modern technology can figure out how to reproduce motion properly then I'll move on to a modern screen.

[CFPartDeux]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

I just drove 8 hours in a rental car up and down a couple mountain passes on the possibility that the seller of an obsolete 12 year old tv would come down from being way over-priced. 

[snip]

He wouldn't budge. I couldn't reasonably justify his price. He wouldn't move. Dead-locked. So I drove the 8 hours back empty-handed.

How nuts am I? 🙂

Gotta say, that IS pretty nuts - 16 hrs. of driving, in a rental, for a 12 yr. old TV!!! 😮I don't care how good said TV is/was, I can't imagine any justification for that amount of time/money spent, even if the person was giving it away! I get it about plasma, though - we have a Panasonic plasma, and the blacks are definitely better than LCD.... haven't noticed stutter issues, but then maybe we're just not susceptible to that problem.

There are two kinds of private sellers:

1. Want to sell it. Price it whatever with an eye to a reasonable fair market value. Some one offers something that you can live with just so its sold.

2. Want to see what they can get while being fine enough to just keep it so not taking much of any offers even if fair market value or more. And so just doesn't sell it.

#1 works for both parties. #2 sucks for the buyer.

Got to agree with the blurb above - some people either have zero idea of market value, or they think that eventually some sucker will come along and pay their exorbitant asking price. I was trying to buy a used phone from someone on Craigslist a while back, only because it sounded like it was in good shape, and because it was located a lot closer than the other same phones that were for sale, but the guy wouldn't budge, and became rather rude about the whole thing. Turned out better in the end anyway, because I got a better spec'd, new phone, for less than the gouger wanted for his used phone. 👍

---

[Anonymous]

---

@Pipcan wrote:

Would have been cheaper and better to get a new one

---

 @Pipcan 

One can't buy a new plasma anymore. See post above.

Unfortunately, my eyes see the motion stutter/judder where things like panning shots cause objects to like jump from position to position rather than smoothly flowing across the screen.

"They" say that OLED has taken over from plasma. Yes for colour and processing and "blacks" but definitely not motion. Although as I said, coming from my old Pioneer, it wasn't wow.

It's possible that going to a larger screen exaggerates these motion effects due to the jumping thing being larger and more obvious. I was side-by-siding (rewind/pause/switch cable, play) the OLED with my old Pioneer and rarely to never saw the effect on the same content. And never noticed it before for all those years.

[will13am]

@Anonymous , I have a couple of friends who have the Pioneer KURO.  They swear that it is still the best TV ever.  I cheaped out and got an LG plasma.  I will only replace it when it fails.  I am still partial to the old technology.  

[Pipcan]

Would have been cheaper and better to get a new one

[Jb456]

@Anonymous  Not long at all more interesting if anything! I can see why you attempted that journey 🙂 Shame the seller wouldn't budge.

[Anonymous]

---

@Jb456 wrote:

@Anonymous  What kind of antique tv made you do this long drive? 

---

It's a long story. Ready? 🙂

Back in the dark ages when you were still in diapers 🙂 I had a 27" CRT. It was perfectly fine for like 20 or so years. Then HD became a thing and of course the unnecessary desire to have a bigger screen.

So I shopped around and found that for 2008, Pioneer marketed their new Kuro (Japanese for black) series of technical advancements in their plasma screens. Mucho dinero but the WAF allowed us to get the 42" model. That thing was beautiful (it still is) up until I got the itch to go even bigger 3 years ago.

Got a low-level Samsung 75" screen. Big. Judder/stutter whatever it is became immediately apparent. My eyes saw it (apparently not everybody does but they might see other things in digital displays that I might not be so aware of) and I find it way too distracting in that it takes me out of being engrossed in the show. Lived with that for a couple years and left it behind when we sold the place.

So we slowly get more settled in to the new place and I start looking at tv's again. Decided on an upper level Sony OLED. Had 30 days to return if need be. It didn't take long to see motion issues. The picture wasn't enough wow from what I had, to justify the money and then add the still present motion issues though not nearly as bad as that Samsung. So I took it back. 4K seemed way too artificially enhanced anyway and then I'm old school with just network type tv stations though I've dabbled with some streaming and the networks are mostly just up to 1080i so what do I care about 4K.

The old Pioneer is still just as lovely. Turns out it can display 4K too just obviously downscaled. So I look around for used ones. Well gosh they seem to be in the neighbourhood of a few hundred dollars for even what was once top of the line last of the brand back in 2009. Heck some folks in the states just say take it away for a good home.

Several have popped up on kijiji but mostly ON. There was one in AB. hmmm. Rather high asking price. This was just around the same time as I was trying out the Sony. So I'm thinking of that one in the back of my mind while I'm looking at the Sony.

That brings us to today. Sigh.

Told you it was a long story. 🙂

[Jb456]

@Anonymous  What kind of antique tv made you do this long drive?