A buddy of mine used to make a ton of money from ties. Buy bulk estate and ebay them, some he made a $1 and some he made $100 or more!
Pawn Shop Cues
- Thread starter Q-Street
- Start date
A buddy of mine used to make a ton of money from ties. Buy bulk estate and ebay them, some he made a $1 and some he made $100 or more!
Well , as someone who has been a picker over 25 years I can tell you that the early days of eBay were some of the very best - if not certainly the best of times to make significant money from stuff you could find at yard sales and thrifts. In the early days of e bay - there was scarcity of many collectible items- so collectors paid much higher prices- I would get $100 on eBay for something that I paid $5 for that today you probably could not sell because eBay became more saturated with goods than the available number of collectors. It was not uncommon for me to find say a 1930s through 1950s wristwatch - such as a rare Hamilton , Illinois, etc. and pay $1 for it and sometimes get $500 on eBay from a higher end collector. Watches like that were given to folks for 25 years service with a company and were sold at yard sales by children or widows as these old timers aged out in the 1990s.
The internet was a double edged sword for pickers- yes it created a larger market because many more people developed a collectors hobby of one sort or another ( almost anything imaginable is collected) - so you had a larger market to sell your stuff; but as time went on- multiples of previously considered "hard to find" items went up for sale and prices of almost everything dropped - not to mention that many of the pawns shops, thrifts, and yard sales started pricing their stuff based upon e bay "asking" prices.
Every Saturday morning I would go out early with a goal in mind of $200 profit in my pocket by 12noon- I did that almost every weekend and often far exceeded- not bad as it was tax free money when you sold, everything sold immediately on eBay if you knew what to pick, and it was a great pastime for me, I learned about every collectible imaginable- values, rarity, and demand.
Pawn shop runs for Cues was a breeze back then - that was just a sideline to my yard sale picks - and a lot of extra income too-- no longer.
middleofnowhere
Registered
Yeah I started doing eBay around 1998 and you're right you could sell almost anything. As time went on it turned out all these rare things weren't so rare at all people had them.
Hardly a thing I would put on that there wasn't one already on there. I had a set of claypool balls that I sold I listed them for a starting price of $5 they sold for $610. Today I bet you couldn't get $50 for them.
I probably do more buying on eBay now than I do selling. But it's still a good place to sell stuff. Surprisingly cue sticks sell pretty good. I sold a billy Stroud Jw had for a $2200. Locally I couldn't get $1,000 for it.
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SSDiver2112
Escott Cues
At league last night one of my team mates had a “new” cue he was trying out. He said his sister found it leaning against her dumpster where she lives. She snatched it up and gave it to him. He had no idea what it was. Ironically, he had mentioned recently he wanted to get a better cue, but couldn’t spend much (wife). So, I guess the pool gods took pity and bestowed a gift upon him. It isn’t one of Dale Perry’s older cues, but it is straight, no major dings, and has a smaller tip diameter like he likes. I played a game with it and it played nice (still like my Pechauer better), I had no real complaints.
Dale Perry made good cues for the $$. Nice find.
Best deal I got at Pawn shop-
RICHARD BLACK
ST JOINT
4 POINTS, 4 VENEERS, 2 IVORY FERRULED SHAFTS
$$300.00 OUT THE DOOR
1999
TULSA
RICHARD BLACK
ST JOINT
4 POINTS, 4 VENEERS, 2 IVORY FERRULED SHAFTS
$$300.00 OUT THE DOOR
1999
TULSA
Willowbrook Wolfy
Going pro
Looking back at this thread I see people saying you might be buying a stolen cue. Well from experience you better have a receipt to prove it’s stolen. I had a Gibson guitar stolen from me, reported it, then found it for sale at a nearby pawn shop. Called the police and told them. They told me bring the original receipt from purchase. Well I had bought it off eBay. Since I didn’t have the original receipt, even with the serial # and showing them I bought it on eBay. the police told me “that’s too bad. We can’t do anything about it”