Unlike the Americans we are not blessed with good weather, nor do we rarely see ‘Yard Sales’ or ‘Flea Markets’ or any opportunity to be able to buy gaming and arcade memorabilia other than off some fly-boy who uses eBay as a pricing tool and then adds some on top – not good, especially when he is not even checking completed listings and using the price of some other fly boy who has had something on-line for wayyy too much money on buy it now for over a year, this my friend, is something that PISSED ME OFF!
“Hey Guys, look what I got at the local Goodwill today” – one sentence that can REALLY piss me off in FaceBook groups…
How many times have you seen ‘dumpster hauls’ or ‘great buy at yard sale today’ posted on your FaceBook arcade and gaming groups, and how many times as a citizen of the United Kingdom do you think “Goddam them Yanks, the one thing I am jealous of….” , oh actually lets make that 2 things, over here in the UK we are inundated with charity shops, these are called Goodwill stores in America, but they dont have all the silly rules we do with electronics, so an American is likely to score a great NES at his local Goodwill Store, whilst ours are likely to get put in the bin before it hits the shelfs because it is not ‘pat tested’ – who the fuck is this Pat and why aint he testing the retro shit 😉 ?
OK, OK , So they have Craigslist, we have Gumtree (grrrrr!) – we all got eBay and we all hate that, but we do have SALESROOM – A great auction site full of art, china, stuffed toys, old antique saucepans, telescopes and dusty armchairs, oh and I forgot to mention, classic arcade/gaming auctions… The-saleroom.com is Europe’s leading portal for fine art and antiques auctions. Visitors to the site can search and browse catalogues and place bids over the internet in real time, with live audio and video feeds communicating the auction room atmosphere.
Todays auction (10th Jan) a nice Mega Drive, boxed, great for the collector @ http://bit.ly/1naYcUP
Basically the ability to be at EVERY SINGLE Auction in the country, or whats more important, be at the ones you want to be on, just by searching the catalouge of THOUSANDS of items.
In 2014 the-saleroom.com hosted 6,018 auction catalogues and 3,860 live auctions and sold over £90m online. the-saleroom.com continues to expand the features it offers having recently introduced a new delivery service, timed auctions and multi-lingual versions of the site.
I Simply have a ton of searches saved for example THIS ONE (click) will show me all the ‘fruit machines’ listed on site, whereby THIS ONE, shows me all Nintendo, at the moment there is an interesting crate auction with Super Nintendo (here – Jan 12th), THIS ONE shows me all Sega, and THIS ONE shows me all Atari, and then some good ones such as GAMES, ARCADE, COMPUTER , and VIDEO GAME. If you can think of any more I would LOVE to hear them, please mention it in the comments section below!
So there you have it a great way to live bid (and never be outbid by £1 again on something you really want) – no doubt in sharing this information with my fellow Arcade Punks, I have just made some of the auctions even more competitive for myself now and at some point we shall be bidding against each other, well just incase we are, please be nice, I am but a lowly poor man….