On 7/14/05, Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Their job is recycling goods. They rarely want to spend the time or money to sort through the equipment properly, test it, clean it up, track down customers, and support it if something goes wrong after the fact. As such, they have no right to complain if somebody scavanges for goods then sells them at a premium. The scavangers are adding value to the product by establishing relationships both with suppliers and with customers. The suppliers get a little more cash than they would by scrapping the equipment, and are saved from the effort of backing their product. The customers are reasonably sure that they are getting what they want, without spending the time to establish their own network or taking the risk of buying equipment as-is. I did run into a recycler who wanted top dollar for their product, because they thought that I was cheating them. They knew which machines were being picked up for my personal collection, and which machines were being sold to cover my costs. In the end they would usually give the equipment to me at a good price, sans a couple of items. There is one bit of irony: they never took out items which I was planning to sell. Other places were quite good though because we had a simple understanding: once the cash was on the counter, the equipment was my problem. They would never see it nor hear about it again. They didn't have the ability nor the desire to support whiny customers, and they were willing to accept that they were not going to receive top dollar because of that. Listening to some of their stories about whiny customers also helped. :) Byron.

On 7/14/05, Vintage Computer Festival <vcf at siconic.com> wrote: So lemme tell you about the time I... ;-) -ethan

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 18:29 -0400, Ronald Wayne wrote: Absolutely - which is why it's frustrating when they won't sell in bulk to someone who'll pay a little over scrap value and haul away a big pile of 80's junk at a time, say. I think the mentality is that they *might* miss out on something good that way, and so even though they don't understand the classic scene at all they rather see the whole lot scrapped than for someone else to take it off them. Bloody annoying :-( Grrr - *people* !! ;) cheers Jules