So you're annoyed that someone (who took the time to go to a charity shop, list the book online, and ship it to you) charged you the RRP for the book, that you didn't have to buy from them?
I hope you have the same kind of energy for when mega-corporations charge anything from tens to thousands of pounds for products that often cost single pounds or even pennies to manufacture (due to underpaying for labour and materials that were in turn manufactured by underpaid labour as well), and the snowballing impact they have on the rest of the economy (by pricing out smaller companies, monopolising industries, avoiding tax, and so on).
The person you bought this from likely works for themsleves, trolling charity shops all day for bargains, and almost certainly pays tax on their income. I'm as anti-capitalist as they get, but even I can't take issue with this. If they had charged you more than the RRP, sure, that'd pushing it, but if you didn't want to pay full price, you should have spent your own time looking for the bargain. ¯\(ツ)/¯
You chose to buy it at that price. What does it matter what the original price was or how much the seller made? You thought the price was fair, had the choice to not buy it or buy it somewhere else.
This isn’t like scalpers buying up items, creating artificial scarcity and driving up prices for profit. This is just plain old capitalism.
Presumably the price also included shipping and handling fees, since you bought it online. So in the end the seller probably made just a couple of quid, he deserves to get paid for what he does no?
Do your libraries not have a system to request books from other libraries? Not trying to be a jerk, I just have looked for some obscure things before and sometimes they had to be requested from other libraries.
https://search.worldcat.org/ is a good inter-library search site. My librarians use it (among other things, I'm sure) to find books/DVDs to acquire for me on ILL, but since the site is public sometimes I just do the search for them and send them a link to what I want when I submit a hold request.
Oh, yes let’s let perfection be the enemy of good.
It’s a rare thing I can’t get from my Library (mostly music and some movies), but anything educational and it’s there.
I regularly check out DVD collections from The Teaching Company of university courses - I’m talking Harvard, Columbia, etc. Currently have History of Western Civilization on deck for ripping. It’s 40 hours of lectures, the DVD collection would cost $1500 on the open market.
It’s one of dozens I’ve ripped for my own use, and converted to MP3 to listen when at gym or in the car.
Everytime i have been unable to find a book in the library i have asked the librarian and had it brough in from another library. i dont think there has ever been a book i wanted they didnt have somewhere in the chain
It is tacky to leave the sticker on there with the lower price, but you are the one who paid 12£. How does it matter what they paid? If they search for books to resell at a profit, that’s time spent, risk taken, and money earned.
Ok, don’t buy it online then go get it from the thrift store yourself. Oh that takes valuable time and effort? Guess that’s why it was marked up, peoples’ time is worth money.
My case rests, the seller of the book provided you a valuable service then by making a product available to you that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get, and you’re mad that they made a little money for their time?
Rofl. Imagine being mildly infuriated that someone marked up a bargain bin purchase by $10 to cover their time and effort to make it available to you to buy from the comfort of your home.
Why don’t you spend your own day rummaging through thrift stores for it next time?
We shit on ‘upselling’ all the time. If you cleaned those pages, pressed them back and touched up the spine of the book, sure. But I’d be annoyed too if there was a 500% markup on a resale of used material
I see 10 pounds for the time and effort to shop around for bargains, then storing your haul, list the items online, and the cost of the other dozens of books that never sell, and then time and effort to package and ship, and whatever customer service along the way.
It could have been £300 and you will still complain and be the sucker for paying for that. Is the seller obligated to ship to you at a price of £2?
You could probably shop around a bunch of Oxfams to (maybe) get the book you wanted for cheap. Or you could also find discounted books at the Oxfam and list them for just £1 or 2 above the sticker price. Is that worth your time?
Like I get being upset at institutional practices like soft drinks costing companies a handful of pence per item when they charge £2.50 (or £4.50 at the cinema), and being stingy on the refills. Books on the other hand are a luxury item that (other than the textbook racket by publishers) you can go without.
It’s the way all other units are handled. I don’t get why money has to be treated differently. Maybe because currencies are the Gods of our time… (hits vape)
What I do to get back at them is to take all our decent donation stuff to local thrift stores and all the bulky crap that’s barely hanging together goes to Goodwill for them to dispose of.
It always sucks to know you paid more than the seller did - but that just means Oxfam undervalued the book.
Having worked in one, charity shops tend to have a habit of either really undervaluing or overvaluing their donated goods - cause the people who actually set the prices mostly just guess based on looks and nothing more. Only if an item looks expensive will they do any research, and even then never really enough.
Granted, it’s not perfect, but I would assume since they have one it’s a publicly traded commodity (that is someone maintains a DB and sells it to such organizations).
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