Shopping for records at Value Village Boutique: Caveat emptor, plus how NOT to price things at a thrift store

Image: an actual fistful of records from Vancouver's new Value Village Boutique, which opened last Thursday. The Velvets reissue with the sticker was priced at $69.99 (you can buy the same edition new from Red Cat for $46.99). It Came from Canada Vol. 2 was $23.99, and gave me some pause (Discogs median $21.67, but it would be more with shipping, so I had to think about it. Do I have Deja Voodoo doing "Three Men One Coffin?" How much do I feel the need to own a Zamboni Drivers song?). In the end, the one I bought is the red one, by The Milkshakes, AKA Thee Milkshakes, an early Billy Childish band. It starts on Discogs for $7.50, but with shipping would be $40 CAD. I like Billy Childish, and they only wanted $18.99, pretty much exactly what I would pay for it at Red Cat, so what the heck. It amuses me to buy Billy Childish from Value Village. 

Apparently it was Alexander Pope who warned that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. 

I doubt he was thinking of thrift stores. While I doubt very much the knowledge imparted below will help thrift stores price their vinyl at a more reasonable rate, it might just save some of the readers from being abused, because -- as exciting as the vinyl selection at the new Value Village Boutique (on Granville near Nelson) might be, the pricing is something to be wary about, especially given that there are no exchanges, once you buy the record, and absolutely no apparent concern for condition; records very visibly wrecked were being sold at entirely unreasonable collectors' prices. So caveat emptor!  

For someone who knows a bit about records, thrift store prices are often ambitious to the point of hilarity, and none worse than at the most famous "for profit" thrift store, the one that barely donates any of its proceeds to charity -- which has been described as an "ethical nightmare," in fact -- Value Village. Before I talk about them, however, let's talk about thrift stores in general, while leaving aside the question of charity. My personal preference there, if I want my money to go somewhere worthy, is hospice or hospital thrift stores, which are also often the most reasonably priced; SPCA and Wildlife-themed thrift stores come in second; religious thrift stores are somewhat more distasteful, as they seem a bit more, I dunno, colonialist -- buying "Bibles for Missions" is not a priority for me, compared to respite for the dying or ill. But there are no thrift stores I eschew because I prefer one charitable cause over another. I'll still shop at Value Village, even though I find their pretext of being a charitable organization quite misleading/ offensive. But if the price is right...

...but therein lies the rub. More often than not, thrift stores fall into one of the following categories, especially in regard their pricing of books and records:

1. They don't know anything, they know they don't know anything, and they price everything accordingly, with an eye towards bulk sales. 

This is my favourite type of thrift store; it is definitely NOT the Value Village model. A few obviously deluxe items aside, almost all books, CDs, DVDs and records at such stores -- Wildlife Rescue in Vancouver is an example; the Salvation Army, in most locations, is another -- are a dollar or two. If what you want is a deal, there's no better experience. I snagged Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra's stellar "Christian libertarian surf punk" debut, Road Gore: The Band that Drank Too Much at a Salvation Army for $2.99 once. You can't beat that. You might even feel a bit guilty, especially since I would have paid $20 for it happily, but what was I gonna do, pass it up because it was underpriced? 

Of course, you have to go fairly often to such stores, and be there when they unload the good stuff, because they're pretty competitive and deals tend to get hoovered up immediately, but if there is one such store in your neighbourhood, diligence is a small price to pay for, uh, the prices you'll pay, if you see what I mean. 

Image: Powerslave by Iron Maiden, priced (in used shape with "no exchange") at $44.99 at the new VV Boutique; you can buy it new for $32.99 at London Drugs. Hm, which of those is the better deal?

2. Alas, the vastly more commonplace thrift store experience, especially when it comes to Value Village, is where they don't know anything, but they think they know something, and they price the wrong things quite high, while (often) letting anything actually valuable go for a song. 

Best as I can figure, the current extremity of pricing that one sees in the secondhand vinyl market directly correlates to the death of David Bowie. There are plenty of David Bowie albums available on vinyl, you understand. Before he died, you could get most used Bowie records for $15-20; even since he died, you can get most of his catalogue, new or used, for a reasonable price, if you shop at a store that actually specializes in records and take some time to do your homework. To pick a record I saw yesterday at the new location of the Value Village Boutique on Granville, Station to Station, you can order a brand new copy of it at Red Cat, on vinyl, for $34.99 (London Drugs, who do a decent job of stocking some new vinyl, but tend to be on the higher end in their new pricing, do not stock this particular title, but the Bowies they do have on vinyl are mostly $39.99). By that logic, if a used store that actually specializes in records were to try to sell it, a reasonable price might be $25 or less, depending on the condition. A first pressing might go for a bit more, but not everyone cares about such things; in many cases, recent pressings have thicker vinyl and improved sound quality, so between a used first pressing and a recent reissue I generally tend to the latter. 

But yesterday at the Value Village Boutique, the record was selling used for $39.99. Was it an early pressing? Probably not; they don't generally seem to pay attention to such things, that I can see. Was it in pristine shape? I did not check, because I was already out of the game as soon as I saw that it was priced for more than a new record, but even if it WERE in good shape before it was put on their shelf, they affix their stickers to the inside of the record, where there is no lamination, so even if it WAS in pristine shape, the act of removing the sticker will likely tear the cover, so it won't be pristine pretty quickly. Probably there were more than a few scuffs and surface noise too. 

But no matter what else we might say, a record should not cost more at a thrift store than it does at a record store. But thrift store or record store, when Bowie died, suddenly dealers everywhere marked his used records up, corresponding, I presume, to a huge sudden demand for his classic material on vinyl. Weirder, customers must be playing ball with it, because it has become the norm in pricing such items: I bet some kid will buy that Station to Station and think he's gotten a great deal, a real investment; he probably won't even have a turntable to play it on. It's not about that, it's about bragging rights: "Wow, look, ma, I got Bowie's Station to Station for only $40!"

That's nice, dear.  

Of course, there were always two bands that have always been subject to this sort of ambition and greed, the Beatles and Pink Floyd, but with Bowie's passing, some sort of chain reaction happened, and suddenly dozens of other artists (the Stones, Bob Dylan, Led Zep, Leonard Cohen, etc) are getting marked up beyond what's reasonable, especially at VVs. It's the low hanging fruit of the vinyl world: if it is from a famous artist from the 60s or early 70s, Value Village are probably pricing it for more than you would pay for for at Neptoon or Red Cat or Audiopile or Zulu, and irrespective of condition, are quite likely charging more than the record sells for new, with "no exchange" if you're not happy with it. 

I like stores like this, however, don't get me wrong. A store that has a battered, ringworn, seam-split, and generally well-used copy of Pink Floyd's The Wall priced at $50, when you can buy it brand new for that price, might also price a genuinely scarce underground item, say (vastly more interesting to me) for $20 or less. If you want to know if you can get a good deal at a thrift store, in fact, seeing how they price Pink Floyd or David Bowie is usually a reliable index of whether it is worth your time. Is there a (warped, scratched) copy of Dark Side of the Moon with the corners of the cover having been eaten by rats, mould stains on the gatefold, a gouge the size of Commercial Drive on side B, and a $40 pricetag? That probably means that they have no clue what they're doing, are too overwhelmed with greed to actually do research, and/or think their clients are the same, so you'll do just fine as long as you avoid the common stuff, which is all they KNOW they can mark up. It's the stuff they've never even heard of that you can get for pennies. 

...And an added bonus is that if you see a thrift store that is exhibiting this sort of greedy and unreasonable behaviour in their pricing, you feel no guilt at all in taking advantage of them by buying the underpriced stuff. 

Of course, the really dumb thrift stores are the ones that overprice the Elvis, or worse, have some Barbra Streisand record marked up to $15 when you can get it at every other thrift store for fifty cents... but it's the same general principle. Many Value Villages are like this, when you ask to see the "collector's vinyl" behind the counter: "Yeah, right, Bachman Turner Overdrive for $29.99, good luck with that." But the new Value Village Boutique actually HAS desirable records; they actually HAVE Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan and Led Zep and Leonard Cohen and so forth on their shelves. They seem to have been hoarding the good stuff from every donation center with this grand opening in mind. Their Elvis might be overpriced, too, but I didn't check.  

Actual condition of a copy of the Beatles' Revolver, priced at $44.99 at the Value Village Boutique. This was a monaural pressing. Mono is the way the record was meant to sound, so this copy would be worth a fair bit more than $44.99 if it were in actually playable shape. Trashed like this, I wouldn't pay a dollar for it. They had a stereo copy, too, priced exactly the same, but I didn't check the condition. My favourite listing for a copy of the mono pressing on Discogs at the moment includes in the item description, "Record is truly marked up. It looks like some people wrote their names just directly on the grooves. Might play. Cover top & bottom seams mostly split, spine full split. Names written in marker, general yellowing. Cleaned with ultra and vacuum system." They are asking $7, but since there are 782 copies of it in mono for sale on Discogs at the moment, even $7 seems ambitious. $44.99 seems like someone was smokin' somethin'. "Might play," indeed.

This brings us to the most rare scenario in the world of thrift store record pricing. 

3. They actually know what they're doing. You should NEVER assume thrift store pricing is being done by someone who has their finger on the pulse of the value of the items they are stickering, but occasionally it does happen. I went into an SPCA thrift store in Victoria the other week, weirdly located in a strip mall, and was very startled: their vinyl was priced pretty much exactly as a real record store would price it. The junk was a buck, but they had lots of rather cool rock and such -- especially lots of Nirvana-related material --  priced for around the same thing that you'd find at nearby stores like Ditch or Supreme Echo. Of course, that's not why people go to thrift stores -- people go to thrift stores because they want a deal, not to pay the same price they'd be paying at a real record store -- but if they actually had had a record I would have bought at Ditch or Supreme Echo, I would have bought it happily from them, too. There would have been no deal, but no guilt either. I flipped through their stock and chatted with the owner, complimented him, and nodded a few times at seeing the prices he was asking; I would have done nothing differently. I also probably won't go back, but it was impressive to see a thrift store being run like a collector's shop, WITHOUT a bunch of predictably greedy, stupid mistakes; he probably does okay by the SPCA on his vinyl sales, compared to other locations (which tend to be more reasonable). 

But Value Village is not that kind of thrift store. The new location, as I say, has some vastly ambitious pricing. The millenials I could see poking around the vinyl section appeared to be excited just to see bands they recognized the names of. At one point, I overheard someone in all sincerity exclaim, "Look, it's a record by the Eagles!" while I was flipping through a different section. Really? A record by the Eagles! Well, that must be worth a whole LOT... Further, they seemed to be taking the pricing on good faith. Maybe their excitement is rooted in some sort of ignorant greedy speculation, too, like they're prospectors panning for gold, who can't tell the fool's gold from the real stuff any more than the seller can...? Maybe the exorbitant prices somehow validate their greed, lock buyer and seller in a little orgiastic fool's gold celebration, while the real prospectors go on about their business, unimpressed...?

My takeaway for millenials, I guess. is to JUST GO TO A GODDAMN RECORD STORE. You might be surprised to discover that that forty or fifty dollar copy of Nebraska you're thinking of buying at VV costs ten or twenty dollars less, in better condition, at a real store (one that guarantees their product, so if there is a warp or scratch or skip you didn't spot, you can bring the record back).  You might also want to check what the lowest-priced copy is on Discogs or eBay, or, if you are afraid on missing out on the sale ("what if I leave it, go to a store, and they don't have it, then I come back and it's GONE?" just PHONE a record store and ask if they have it, and how much it sells for. Neptoon, Red Cat, Zulu, and Audiopile are all reasonable. You might save yourself some money! 

By far my favourite find which I did not buy (but only because I already have it) was Mine Would Be the Sun, by the Suitesixteen, fronted by BUM's Rob Nesbitt, who I'm eventually going to write something major about; I have a long history with Nesbitt and find him a fascinating person, one of the smartest, most articulate people I've interviewed. And while Green Day-esque power pop is not, in fact, my go-to, musically, these days, I have a ton of respect for this record, which is an amazingly detailed, meticulously assembled labour of love on Rob's part, a  double album inspired in part by the Who's Quadrophenia, written about his first love, whom he met when he was a student at the same damn junior high school that I went to out in Maple Ridge (I knew him, back when). In a stroke of stunningly awful bad luck, Rob released the album just before COVID. He was never able to properly tour it, has not played a live show since the lockdown, and is basically sitting on boxes of it, not sure what to do with it this many years down the road. Record collectors with an interest in local music might want to snag it -- it's kind of a one-of-a-kind album that the collectors of the future will no doubt discover and find fascinating -- though if you're on the island, or are planning a trip, I would recommend LOOKING ROB UP and BUYING IT DIRECT FROM HIM, because the copy at Value Village costs the same damn price as he's charging (well, $59.99 vs. $60; it's a penny cheaper at VV). 

If you're on the mainland, mind you, well, at least you'll save on shipping.  

There were a few records I might have bought if the prices were a bit more realistic. The Cure's The Walk was something like $30; I might have played $15 or even $20, because you don't see it around very often (and it has a cool cover), but it only has six songs on it, and the two I like most, I already have on a Cure anthology. The English Beat's album with "Mirror in the Bathroom" on it kind of appealed to me, too, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why they were asking $39.99. It wasn't signed, didn't seem to be a particularly desirable pressing, wasn't sealed, believe it was just your standard North American "English Beat" version (not "the Beat," which would denote the UK pressing). A comparable copy costs $11 on Discogs (plus shipping, of course). I have no doubt that if I spent an hour, phoning around, I could get the record for $20 or less at a store; I would have happily paid $10 at a thrift store, but no more.  

After spending an hour or so there on Thursday, and another hour or so there yesterday, the stuff I finally did buy, besides the Milkshakes, is pictured below.  

The Holy Modal Rounders double album was $16.99, in really nice shape. I have reissues of both the albums it compiles already, but not the two pages of liner notes in the gatefold, plus I've always had a fondness for this Fantasy twofer, which a) was how I was first introduced to the band by BC musician Matt Rogalsky, and which b) makes the name of the band seem like they're Someone You Oughta Know, with which valuation I abundantly agree. Robert Christgau is a big fan of the Rounders, and especially of the surviving half of this duo-form version, one Peter Stampfel (who was also in the Fugs; you know the really screechy background vocal on "CIA Man," or the lead vocalist on the Rounders' "If You Want to Be a Bird," on the Easy Rider soundtrack? That's Peter). I've interviewed Peter a few times. He's still playing shows (age 84!) and working on new material; he's a bit of a musical hero of mine. And to be clear: I did not buy this to flip it, or because I thought it was worth a whole lot of money, above what they were charging (I'd be lucky to get my own money back, were I to attempt to sell it, but no matter, because I'm not going to). I bought it because I love the music on it, know the record, and do not have it. And because the price was, unlike almost everything else at the VV boutique, exactly right for what a thrift store should be charging for such a thing. $16.99? Done.

As for B.A.D., it was $18.99, which seems a bit much, but I have been looking for this since I found out how deeply involved Joe Strummer was in the project. I've only listened to it one time through but I think I like it better than Cut the Crap and maybe even Earthquake Weather (though it will take some time and repeated spinnings to know; so far so good, tho'). In my years of B.A.D. snobbery, I overlooked completely that Joe co-wrote five songs and produced the album; he might even do a backup vocal here and there? I guess I'm late to this party, because no store I've looked for it at has had it. But the condition was right, and now I can stop looking for it, even if $18.99 seemed a bit high. 

The Buffy Sainte-Marie albums were a bit stranger, in that they were quite reasonably priced at $5.99 and $7.99, they seem like I *could* possibly flip them, for trade at least, if I decide I want to. Really, it all comes down to the scratch on one side of the "best of" twofer. Hard to tell if it will affect play. It's pretty ugly-looking, but that's not always a determiner; sometimes you have to spin the record to see. But "Universal Soldier" is on the album -- my favourite song by her, of the ones I know -- and not on the bad side, and I don't actually have a copy of that song in my collection; so in the worst case, I've bought myself a Buffy Sainte-Marie album. And I do like her! And $7.99 is about the right price for a double record with a big scratch on one side, so what the heck. 

In sum: it's not impossible to find a good deal at the new Value Village, just difficult. I hope that time and experience teach them that if they're pricing damaged product for more than it can be bought for new, it won't pay off in the long term; that they have to consider condition when it comes to vinyl; and that they should at least check what the Discogs median is, or what completed eBay auctions have the album going for,  before they stick a pricetag on it (maybe with glue not likely to tear the cover?). In the meantime, in the interests of making sure that message gets through, if you're shopping there, be careful, eh? At the very least, CHECK THE CONDITION, because they didn't. If it actually looks playable, go to Discogs, find the album you are considering, make sure you're looking at the vinyl version (not the CD), and then look at the median price -- the average that it actually has sold for. For that Big Audio Dynamite, the median is $5.73, while the high is $26 or so. You might guess that a record store would charge $20 at best for an album like that, but more reasonably might let it go for $10 or $15. Paying any more than that is a bit dim, unless you personally have looked for it in half a dozen record stores and have not seen it, which is exactly the case with me and this record. 

Be aware, though: chances are whatever you are buying is overpriced, and since you won't be able to exchange it, examine it very carefully, eh?

Happy shopping!