Category: Catalog Item For Sale At The Thingery

I have a web site which is sixteen years old. Its main objective is to peddle some collectible record albums (recently simplified-there was more).

On that site, I’ve categorized the record albums by decades: fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and up-to-now. It of course is also sorted by genre and artist and all that stuff, but the decade categories are most important to me.

This was always SUPPOSED to be capped at five hundred listings, but then I discovered flipping records at Facebook a little over a year go and I’ve never made it to five hundred.

I think there’s a new generation of record buyers who are drawn to the social aspect of trading on Facebook.  Imagine that-it USED to be like that at eBay.  Facebook should just buy eBay.

I have a fairly large stock and have been working at steadily replenishing things, and the screenshot from today sort of demonstrates a bell curve with a funny shape: eight from the fifties, sixty-one from the sixties, two hundred twenty-eight from the seventies, one hundred and five from the eighties, and five from the nineties.

In other words, I decided to get into the business just in time for the industry to switch to another format. There WEREN’T any damn records in the nineties. Oh, there, were a few, especially in the early part of the decade, but when I flung open the doors in late 1987, the industry was already converting to CD’s and when I gave up in early 2001, they we rethinking that.

Brilliant, eh?

Fortunately, while I was just standing there doing nothing, lots of people dumped their record albums on me, eventually driving my partner to divorce me, among other things. Since I was there to peddle records anyway, I dived into “used records”.

When I moved from the brick and mortar to the Internet, I took it all with me. The store didn’t have the traditional going-out-of-business sale. Since I was destined to move twice in the coming twenty years, I lugged hundreds of pounds of records with me from town to town and stored many of them in less-than-ideal spaces, but many boxes did survive.

Then, in October 2020, Facebook introduced “and shipping” or whatever they call it to their Marketplace. Based on local person to person sales, I was no fan of Marketplace because that horse-trading in local groups and meeting each other at Walgreen’s just didn’t fit my lifestyle. But I know a LOT about shipping, e-commerce-wise, and Facebook seemed to want to see record albums, which became “hot” again in 2017, according to Wikipedia. Facebook gave away the store in incentives and I hauled a hundred pounds of records to the Post Office until I had to stop because I was out of boxes and the new Postmaster General had declared war on his own Post Office.

It took a little while to reload and reorganize, and the holiday season, which does touch record albums, was over, and we had a nice steady year throughout most of it, and then they did it again! Facebook bought a bunch of postage for a bunch of Marketplace shoppers and gave them 20 per cent off, and it was wonderful, and I shipped a hundred pounds of records to the Post Office again.

So, now we only have four hundred records again after they ravaged our stock, but we are working on the problem. Since we produce audio tracks of everything we sell, we can’t go faster than at least forty-five minutes per album because we record those samples in real time. Yes, I could set the turntable on 78 and compensate for that in the Audacity recording, but I just don’t.

The stock at the Facebook store will dwindle for a couple of weeks now while we put together a new group, but everything you see at Facebook STARTS at our site, which is supposed to building a great big customer base of its own. The general strategy for pulling stock from the site to take to FB is to work the oldest listings there first.

That means, if we’ve REALLY sucked you in, you should watch our near-daily additions at the Thingery. That’s here:

Just a tip to the wise.

The web site is actually little bit broken, so we hid all the other categories, but I personally like it better as a just-records site and may spin off  “the other stuff” to a couple of various places, including maybe a new Zen Cart with which I am tinkering.

We’ve got some nice stuff planned for our Facebook Shop: as listings there drop under sixty, we’re going to replace them with sealed albums for a while. People like those.