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Invest in Vinyl folks, they’re not making any more of it

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Daughter moles has risen to the top of volunteering at her local Oxfam shop, and is now responsible for pricing up all vinyl. She came home today with the staggering fact that Rod Stewarts’ Greatest Hits (the pink satin jacket one, you know the photo of Rodders) was now averagely priced on ebay at £12.00. A little cross-googling largely corroborated her story, that you could pick up a copy for £4.00, but others thought that a good copy might be worth north of a tenner.
So, what gives? In my mind this is near the top of the chazza shop least wanted. (Yes she’s seen more than one copy of No Parlez). Is the vinly lifestyle madness now inflating even the last likely artists. And, pity her, any copy which might be above £8.00 they have to listen all the way through to check for pops and scratches.

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  1. I’m also an Oxfam vinyl valuer and my reaction is the same as yours. I mostly use Discogs where there are currently 61 for sale from £1. The most important number is the price that they actually sell for. Discogs range from £1.53 – £7.68 (P&P on top). If you are using ebay I would advise looking at the completed listings where they go for 99p plus P&P. If it was in very good condition I would value it at £3.99 tops, more likely £2.99.

    If they get £12 for it fantastic. Ebay’s market place is the whole world so the chances of someone wandering into a charity shop and paying that are slim.

    • Daughter Moles here,
      I can confirm that last week we sold another Rod Stewart album for well over a tenner so maybe he’s popular in our area. Which is a good thing if we can shift them because our storage shelves are full of him.

  2. Jings, I saw several copies just today! I’d be very surprised if Oxfam really do shift these at that price, though.

    In other vinyl news, Sony are to resume producing vinyl, so I wonder how long this (perceived?) 2nd hand bubble will last.

    Edit: glad to hear that chazzas are attracting young, keen volunteers. Good on daughter moles!

    • I’ve never been to Japan but my wife has plenty. She eats lots more fish than I do and, even so, lost a lot of weight.

      I’ve been to mainland China quite a bit (mainly ‘moody’ DVDs) and Hong Kong lots – best catch there was a Japanese edition of the Blue Aeroplanes ‘Swagger’.

  4. Is there something self- perpetuating here..? I.E. someone sees a record they quite fancy and assume the price is about right..? Good luck to the chazzas who can get it, but clearly there are people with more money than sense….or an unwillingness to use the internet or do a bit of basic research.

    On the same sort of subject, I was going to take a malfunctioning Arcam CD player to the tip, but thought I might get a few quid and it would be useful to someone for spares, so put it on eBay…fetched £200….go figure!!

    Oh, and there is a vinyl pressing plant in the UK…right here in Exmouth! I’m trying to get an interview, but I’m assuming it is a specialist type setup….we’ll see!

  5. Invest in vinyl folks, they aren’t making any more of it. But of course they now are. As indeed they are with land, just at the incredibly slow rate of a couple of centimetres a year in Iceland.

  8. Oxfam vastly over-price vinyl, other Charity vendors are catching up. Most don`t even look at the LPs for flaws. I no longer buy vinyl from Charity Shops, most of it is unplayable. At least with Discogs/ebay you are protected with PayPal.

    Before anyone shoots me down in flames I contribute books/DVDs/Blurays/Mags/clothing to these shops, well one in particular – `Mind` on a regular basis.

    • I don’t think you can make such generalisations about Oxfam or any other charity shops. It all depends on the volunteers. Some do massively over price, some haven’t got a clue and put 99p on everything. Recently I got 2 near mint classic early 70s Stevie Wonder LPs for £3 each. I also got Reuben Wilson’s Got To Get Your Own Chess 45 for 50p. The cheapest copy on Discogs was over £100

      • It does seem to depend somewhat on the volunteers. I visited three different branches of the same hospice shop on Saturday; in one, vinyl is priced at a blanket 50p for LPs and 25p for singles (recent purchases have included Miles Smiles and Milestones), one has everything set at a pound, and the other prices LPs individually (meaning that a battered OMD album marked £4 has sat there for weeks on end). You can guess which one I visit the most, and which has the highest turnover.

        However, I’m all for charities making the most of their donations, and I hate it when customers lose sight of the fact that they are not the charity, so if you can get Rod out the door and make a tenner from it, then good for you!

  9. I went to see New Order at the weekend, as part of the Manchester International Festival, and whilst in the city I went along to the True Faith exhibition at the Manchester Art Gallery. Well worth a visit – anyhow, they have produced two limited edition vinyls of Joy Division’s Closer and New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies albums, to coincide with the exhibition – 1000 copies of each. They are a rather expensive £35 each, but I took the plunge and bought them, telling myself they are a good investment…

      • This, of course, is VERY, VERY good news for anyone who isn’t interested in anything released after 1970, in Elvis’s case after 1959.
        I surprise myself sometimes how I’m always about five steps ahead of the industry, I really do.
        What’s more, your dodger’ll be far more likely to go for jump-suit, hamburger, Vegas Elvis (something to do with irony) anyway.

        Thing is with Elvis’s fan-base, they actually like CDs.
        It makes more sense to get a Follow That Dream 2-CD set full of unreleased/rare material with a fantastic booklet for £20 than expensive vinly just for the sake of expensive vinly.
        They’re sharper consumers than the vinly fetishists.

  10. I am also a Vinyl valuer for Oxfam. I can’t speak for any other shop but for the branch I volunteer at I grade and value records accurately and fairly.

    Obviously Oxfam and other charity shops rely on volunteers and when you’re into something as complicated and nuanced as valuing vinyl records don’t be surprised if the pricing is a bit inconsistent – the Vinyl market is fast moving and even dedicated record dealers have to be on their toes with pricing – the easiest way for charity shops to maximise their income is to overprice rather than underprice on Vinyl records and look for the highest price they can see online at the same sources you can all access.
    The only “bargains” you’ll get these days are CDs released between 1990-2010 and 70s/80s and early 90s pop 7″s.

    • “…overprice rather than underprice on Vinyl records and look for the highest price they can see online at the same sources you can all access.”

      This is the reason I, and others I know of, avoid Oxfam like the plague. Mind you, we’re tightfisted bastards.

      • Went to an Oxy the other day, wasn’t wildly overpriced compared to some but a pretty ho-hum hits comp from about 30 years ago on vinly (Spandau Ballet etc.) was the same price (£10) as a first edition of the hardback “Bob Dylan Writings and Drawings” “pink” book from 45 years ago.
        Great picture of him as Alias on the back.

        Ten years ago, the book would have been £30/40, the vinly comp 49p.
        Time to get clever on this stuff, it’s a buyer’s market; I ever-so-slightly bought the book.

  11. There’s a “specialist” Oxfam record shop in Edinburgh. The prices are consistently higher than I’d expect in a decent 2nd hand retailer. The staff are incredibly self important. In my view they enjoy pretending they are doing important work while if they had to invest their cash and make a living running a business they wouldn’t last five minutes. It’s all very well charity shops trying to maximise their income but there is overpriced vinyl sitting in their racks for months when a sensible price would shift it quickly. A lot of the shops seem to miss the fact condition matters too. It takes a lot of the joy out of the chase and often the tenner in my pocket remains there for another day.

  12. Charities trying to make money… utter bastards!

    Give your cash to a second-hand record shop instead, and they will give a percentage to cash-starved community workers* in your local area, instead of those lazy African sods.

    (*dealers)

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