any record (45/LP0) record collectors?
If your travels ever take you to Pittsburgh, Jerry's Records is "The Place". I've been going there for maybe 20-25 years, enough so that Jerry would remember my name on one of my semi-annual visits. (Of course the fact that I would drop $500-$750 on each visit may have been a factor in his remembering me as well.)
https://jerrysrecords.com/
(RIP, Jerry. And thank you!)
I've been to Jerry's! You can spend a lot of time in there. Most anything of value gets picked up quickly so you'd be extremely lucky or willing to pay a lot to come out of there with anything special.
I just logged in to Dicogs which I haven't done in a long time. I actually need to update some recent purchases but I checked my collection's current value -
Estimated Collection Value: Low $4,394.28 Med $11,183.03 High $22,172.64
Now, there's no way I'd ever expect to get the high value. A lot of the records I own I got when I was a teenager. They were used accordingly without any real thought of future collectible value. While not completely trashed, none of them are in pristine shape so even if they are rare, the condition brings the value down significantly. Records I bought later in life tend to be in better condition because I'd buy them and just put them away.
It just so happened that the type of music I liked back then wasn't terribly popular so most of what I had was limited to a few hundred or few thousand copies. 40-45 years later, these records command a lot of money on the collector market. If I sold everything I'd hope to get somewhere close to the median value but even that might be pushing it. I won't sell them but it's fun to know that they are worth something.
That's kind of the Discogs effect which is similar to what Ebay did to the world of buying and selling of things. These sites have basically become national advertising for your wares. Like Ebay, people put stuff up with outrageous pricing hoping they'll catch a sucker but I believe most deals for valuable records happen through private transactions where prices are negotiated to more reasonable levels. It's the same with car stuff.
A lot of people in record nerd world use Discogs as a reference so it does tend to be the arbiter of pricing, however artificial or unrealistic. How many times have you been in the trenches at a swap meet and hear something like, "I need more for that record, I can get double that on Discogs!"
