OK, here's the story of my estate sale haul today, and how I stuck it to the eBay resellers.
In case anyone didn't see my post in the general thread I made while standing in line this morning, there were two guys that had gotten there ahead of me & were swapping stories about the best way to price gouge for the games they picked up at yard sales. Two *really* douchey guys. I whispered to my wife that we were wasting our time, because since they had gotten there ahead of us & would therefore get in before us, I figured they would have anything worth having before I got there. But I had woken up early & gotten there, so I was gonna stay & see what happened. Well when 8:00 hit & they let us in, I see those two guys heading towards the back of the house. I knew the people having the sale had mentioned some stuff was upstairs, so I figured I'd go that way & see what I could find. The game stuff wasn't there, but wouldn't you know sitting in a closet was an empty NES/ROB system bundle box. I snatched that, it's not in perfect shape but I've definitely seen worse and it's my first NES box. No styrofoam, unfortunately, but what can you do? I ask the people upstairs that were working the sale where the games were, and the lead me back downstairs & pointed to a room in the far back of the house.
I go in, and sure enough there are the scalper brothers tearing through the games & systems in the corner. But what's this?!?! Right above their heads, that they'e completely ignoring, is a complete & in really good condition ROB!
That was the main thing I wanted, since I had seen "Nintendo robot" mentioned in the description of what they had. I reach over their heads and grab it, and as soon as I do one of the two guys looks up and just groans. He goes "man, I drove an hour to get that! I can't believe it was sitting right there and I looked over it!" Then he sees the box, and is like "where did you get that!?!?" I told him, and both of those guys looked like someone had just drowned their favorite puppy. It was all I could do not to laugh. Turns out there were no big scores in the games either - best thing they had was a Dragon Quest IV, but they had it marked $50 so that was hardly a deal. Oh, and the NES systems were being sold for $30/each, with NOTHING but the system - controllers were marked $10 each, and I'm not even sure if they had the power/video cords. So I finally get to the games, and pull out a decent selection that I either had fond memories of as a kid or were cheap enough & interested me enough that I figured they were worth the pickup. All of them were priced from $2 to $8 (Gradius was $8, but I loved that game as a kid).
So I came away with all of this:
IMG_4432...for $81 total. I feel like that was a really good price, especially judging by what at a glance I saw some complete ROB's going for on eBay. He's going to be a real showpiece in my collection - gonna clean him up real good & find a nice place to display him.
