Quoted from Gnatty:As an outsider that has followed your stories of this Virginia deal, I have some observations....
1. Why do you continue to buy machines that you have no money for, no space for, for the purpose of resale if your not in it as a business?
2. You clearly have “too many pins”, why have you not started selling off what sounds like a massive hoard of games years ago? No one here in this hobby has the means or time to stash that many machines with “intentions” to restore them for your collection, WITH NO SPACE FOR THEM TO BE PLAYED.
I have no problem with you buying these games but I think people are rubbed the wrong way when you state your not in it as a business, make threads of potential sales after potential warehouse deals. Wait to have machines in hand, have space ready for said machines, then list machines at prices that reflect condition.
I’m not trying to bash you at all, in fact I think it’s great your “saving” these games. Better preparation, recognizing you have way too many games hoarded, doing something about it and listing things like every person and business on here does.... when games are ready to sell, with pics and fair prices. It’s really not that difficult.
This warehouse deal came from a "ghost in the past" and is kind of a very long story. To try to keep it as short as possible about 6 years ago I was looking for a Space Shuttle machine for our collection and I found a guy in Virginia selling one as part of a lot of 6 or 8 machines. I bought those machines from him just to get the Space Shuttle I wanted for our collection.
Anyway at that time he told me his uncle had warehouses full of machines and he had helped his uncle move a bunch of stuff around and the uncle gave him the machines I had bought as payment for this nephew helping him. Long story short 4 years later that seller contacted me and told me his uncle was ready to sell off the balance of his stuff. He wanted to deal with me because I was fair & honest with him on that first transaction.
Uncle & nephew only want to deal with me - I tried talking them into letting me pass deal off to someone local and their answer was "you or no one". So bottom line if I don't save these they will likely end up in a landfill. They are not coming to me cheap because I always pay what I think is "fair prices" for what I buy. But it isn't about money to the seller - they just want an easy transaction with someone they trust. In fact the deal is "X" amount of money for the balance of the machines then once I have the stuff sold I'll send them more if I do better than expected for them.
I have never been in the hobby for money - I am semi retired and buy and sell machines trying to upgrade our collection and get machines to people who will enjoy them or do something with them. Rarely do we have more than a handful of machines sitting that are not in our collection or up for sale but the past couple years my life has been turned upside down because of the volume of machines that have come in because of these couple warehouse deals.
After fuel cost, truck rental, storage rent, selling cost, etc I made enough on the last deal to have a couple decent meals and add one $2500 machine to our collection. Hardly worth all the work but as anyone who knows me will tell you - I don't do pinball for the money!
I do have dozens of "junk machines" in storage I part out as I have time trying to help people save their machines. But that is another entirely different story. And if anyone is interested I would sell that inventory in a heartbeat because I just don't have the energy it takes these days.