After our success last week with selling our telescope on eBay, we decided to sell an electric guitar that we’ve had sitting around. I bought the guitar as a gift for my father about 10 years ago. He’s played acoustic guitar for 35 years, and had often mentioned that an electric guitar would be fun. So when I was a senior in college, working at Safeway and feeling rich because I had money left over after paying the rent and grocery bill, I decided to buy one for him. I didn’t know squat about electric guitars, so I just went to a music store and asked the guy there what I needed. He sold me a guitar and an amp for a total of about $500.
My father played it some, but it turned out that he still preferred the acoustic guitar. Then He got sick about six years ago, and his guitar playing pretty much disappeared for a few years. When my parents moved to a smaller house last year, my mother discussed the guitar with me, and said that it wasn’t getting used anymore, and asked if I’d like to sell it, since I was the one who bought it. I felt funny about that, since I had bought it as a gift in the first place, but she convinced me, so I agreed.
Last week, we listed it on eBay and sat back to see what would happen. We put $65 as the shipping price, since that was the highest shipping price we saw for any other guitar/amp set. And on Saturday, the whole thing sold for $34. Yep, $34. All told, the guy gave us $99, including shipping. We sold another doodad at the same time – a lens filter set for the telescope, which got us $31. Yesterday we went to the UPS store to mail both items, and the shipping bill was $124.55. So we made a total of $130.27, and spent $124.55 on shipping. I’m not an eBay wizard (obviously) but that doesn’t seem like a good return for the time we spent listing the stuff on eBay.
We were both bummed at first, but then we thought about how it could have been worse – what it we’d made $124 and spent $130 to ship? Plus, since I bought the guitar as a gift, I never expected to get anything back for it anyway. And the guy who bought it is having a great week, so we get some good eBay karma out of the whole thing.
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