Don't Sell His Records Until You Read the Smooth Part

Don't Sell His Records Until You Read the Smooth Part In 1987 I stood in a basement in Olyphant and told a family their father's records were worthless. There were four hundred of them, in six milk crates under the stairs. They sold the lot to a man with a van for forty dollars. I helped carry them out. Eleven years later I saw a record hanging on a shop wall like a picture, and the price on it was more than I made that week. The man behind the counter turned it over and showed me the marks scratched into the smooth part near the label, and I recognised the stack I had carried out of that basement. Here is the honest part, first, because everybody else leaves it out. Most records in a house are worth between one and five dollars. The orchestras, the Christmas albums, the classical box sets nobody opened - those are worth nothing, and that is most of the crate. I am not going to tell you your father's records are a retirement fund. But in four hundred records there are usually three or four that are not one to five dollars. And the difference is on the back: a label, an address in small print, a word, a mark pressed into the wax the size of a grain of rice. It takes ten seconds to check and almost nobody checks. I did not check either. A word about the numbers in this video. I am giving you market ranges, not sales I watched with a date on them. On records the condition changes the price three or four times over, so anybody who gives you one exact number is telling you what they hope, not what they know. THE LIST - free Everything I learned in those nine hundred houses, room by room. What to look at twice, and what to let go of without thinking about it again. [LINK] Or write the word LIST in the comments and I will send it to you myself. WHAT'S IN HERE 00:00 Four hundred records, forty dollars 03:28 The honest number, said out loud 04:31 The list, and how to get it 05:40 The pile that is worth nothing 06:51 Classic rock, and the reissue trap 08:07 The Beatles, and why almost nobody has the good one 09:27 Jazz - where the money actually is 11:16 Soul, and the singles in the shoe box 12:36 Mono against stereo - the one that goes backwards 13:44 The white label copies 14:46 Punk and metal on labels nobody has heard of 16:01 The seventy-eights, and when the answer is no 17:35 The sleeve is half the price 18:45 How to read a record in ten seconds 20:25 Three things you will read this week that are wrong 21:52 What to do once you have found something 24:10 Back to that basement I am not a licensed appraiser and nothing here is an appraisal. If a record matters to you, take it to somebody who will put a number on paper and sign it. Everything I learned in forty-one years, in writing: I'm Arlene. For forty-one years I cleaned out houses in northeastern Pennsylvania — after a funeral, before a move, when the stairs finally got to be too much. More than nine hundred of them. In 1984 I emptied my grandmother's house in three days because I had to be back at work on Monday. Her mixing bowls went to a flea market for three dollars. Twenty years later I found the same set in a house in Dunmore and had it appraised at four hundred and sixty. That is the whole reason this channel exists. Here I go through what is actually in your cabinets, your attic and your basement, and I tell you three things about each one: what it is, what it really sells for, and whether to keep it, sell it, give it away or throw it out. Most of it is worth about thirty dollars. Some of it is not. I will tell you which is which, and I will not tell you your junk is a fortune.