19 Oct
2000
19 Oct
'00
8:56 a.m.
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Aaron Nabil wrote:
People who buy and sell surplus have a much wider
market than "classic
computer collectors" or they are out of business. If anything, the
collectors are the fringe weirdos who hang around the warehouse
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Don't you mean computer preservationists?
sniffing about the dumpsters and making absurdly low
offers on
things. Ie, me.
Why not do that? If no one is making any offers, then our low offers
should be appreciated; after all, is it not more sensible to make some
money on something rather than no money, or at lease minimize the
losses? Aside from it being better for us, it's also better from a
business standpoint. To just toss equipment into the dumpster because
no one will pay a certain fixed price for it, seems like a
temper-tantrum (wahhhh.... no one will pay me what I want.... [sounds
of feet and fists hitting floor and jumping up and down on the
computer equipment] wahhhhh!!!!). That, I think, is childish, is it
not?
A more accurate rendition would be "If I
can't get the minimum price
I want for it, I won't sell it to you for less even though I might end up
throwing it away later." Which seems perfectly reasonable to me. I trust
Ok, time to put your thinking cap on... no, not the romper-stompers, your
thinking cap. Ok, now, didn't you mean to say "wasteful" instead of
reasonable? ;-)
sellers are sufficiently motivated by pressures like
"eating" and "paying
the rent" that they will always accept a truly reasonable offer.
If they're reasonable, then, they'll take _some_ amount of money from
a collector if no other buyers are willing to pay more, so as to
minimize their losses, rather than take total losses and destroy
vintage equipment that, somewhere, someone can find useful. It's not
like we're out here looking for free handouts. We offer to pay what
we think is reasonable, although free finds are certainly nice when we
do find them. :-)
Well, one problem is what you are defining as
"vintage" and as "unethical
to dumpster" might be what the vendor defines as crap. There is a wide
The vendors only define vintage equipement as "crap" because they
don't know any better... of course, that's often to our advantage,
but not always.
"vintage" in my mind, but that's just my
personal tastes). The list
reports of "Ooo! I just rescued a Radio Shack COCO from Goodwill!" seems
only an fraction less silly to me than someone reporting that they
"rescued" a 15 inch VGA monitor from Goodwill. So to you it might be a
There are still plenty of uses for 15" VGA monitors for applications that
don't require high-res. graphics.
If you want to label the desire to maximize profit as
"greed and
selfishness" you are welcome to but it's not a very realistic way of
looking at how the world works.
Yes, and look at the condition that the world is in. Maximizing profits
beyond a certain point can be bad for business; take too much away from
customer service, goodwill, etc. and those pennies squeezed out to be
saved soon become pennies lost.
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