Nostalgic dialog: buying & selling used TVs

[bgadow]

I discovered the used tv market about 1990. I had time to kill and spent a lot of it checking out flea markets, used furniture stores, and the allies behind tv repair shops. I started dragging home sets that needed work and trying to do something with them.

Around that time any used furniture store worth its salt had a pile of sets, usually a combination of bw portables, tube & ss color sets. Solid state consoles w/remote could easliy bring over $200, while non-remote models were in the $125-150 range. A 70s Colortrak 19" was a common find, for about $100. Tube color sets were still saleable, but getting cheap. $35-45 seemed to be the range for such consoles around 90-91. It seems like by the mid-90s consoles really fell out of favor. I never had many to sell, really, because I was so inept! Thelast one I remember selling was an early 80s RCA remote set, very clean, for $125 to friends of mine. That must have been about 93 or so. By the late 90s most of the old guys who had booths at the flea market were gone, and all the used furniture stores had given up the business. I remember talking to people about some sets I was trying to move and when they found out it was a console they lost all interest. Funny how quick they fell out of favor. They sort of became "trailer trash" sets.

I do recall, as Charles mentioned, sets in the paper needing repairs but still priced plenty high. And they used to sell. Near here there is a freight salvage store and I recall, all through the 80s, how he would get in new consoles with busted crts. They always sold in about a week. Not cheap, either.Now, about 2 years ago he had a perfect System 3 console that he tried selling for an employee. It gathered dust for months, finally selling for $15 as I recall.

For the past 2 weeks there has been an ad in the local classifieds for a color console, free. Has an audio problem. I called and left a message the first day it ran, saying if it was really old to give me a call, but I haven't heard back. I did drag home a free CTC-149 recently. I'm going to end up with about $10 worth of parts in it, and will be extremely lucky if I can get my money out of it.