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Originally Posted by Thyratron
Reading up on the 2009 digital "conversion" lately (not exactly crazy about it; don't get me started) has led to an interesting thought. Many of us make a lot of our old tv finds at the local thrift stores and similar places. Well the "warning" disclaimers have already started showing up attached to the older tvs in many of these places; I would almost take a guess that, come 2009, many of the thrift stores will simply be dumping the "obsolete" tvs that come in, rather than putting them on the shelves only to sit for extended periods of time. I wonder if it's better to stock up now on the good finds that we come across, or will there be a huge surplus of stuff for free/extremely cheap (on the roadside, etc.) once the deadline comes? I'm just afraid that anything that even looks remotely old will end up being tossed in the dumpster before it even has a chance to land on the shelves, due to being "unusable" in the minds of much of the population. Any thoughts?
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My advice would be to stock up NOW! Around here; the thrift stores (mostly church or charity related) are real picky about the used TV's they will accept because they don't want to get stuck with something broken or even a working set that may sit on the shelf six months before someone buys it. I asked the lady that runs one of the shops to please call me if anything old comes in and she said she would. I asked a guy at another shop and he was a real smart @_ _ and told me they would not have time to call me for every broke piece of junk they found and that it would go to the trash. There will probably still be elderly people that have older sets on hand because they may not have the means to dispose of the things. I have run ads in the paper offering free pickup of non working TV's and most of the replies I get from such ads are from the elderly. Even with the ads; I have not picked up a tube set in several years. The oldest sets I find are usually from the '80's. The '90's were a different story. I got sets from '50's B&W's to modern sets. I could just kick myself for not hanging on to some of those older sets. All I can do now is start searching again and promise to do better at keeping some of the stuff I find. Oh, and don't get me started on the digital conversion, either...