Rant about TC trade room bargain hunters :(

This is a PUBLIC RANT!!! I felt the need to put my thoughts and feelings up in plain English so people would understand where I’m coming from, now if you’re easily offended I suggest you STOP reading right now, I will probably opening myself to a world of hurt from this but at this point in time I don’t care, I’m not going to name any names but if it means alienating myself from a few people then so be it, I’m trying to make a point here and hopefully some members will agree with me on this….

In the picture below you can see a Tamiya Boomerang that I have just sold, I got it quite a while ago and recently I did quite a bit of restoration work to bring it up to the standard you see here, I've sold this car because it was a case of I have two of them and one needed to go, I will say that this car came to me at a ridiculously cheap price and was mostly complete but in need of some TLC, I sorta didn't need it at the time but the deal was too good to refuse mainly as the car came with radio gear fitted :) anyway it sat around for ages then I decided to tart it up and sell it on for a bit of profit, so I give it a good clean, put some new decals on the body along with a touch of paint, fitted some better wheels & tires and new axle bearings, and after a bit of messing around with a dodgy radio transmitter it was fit to go :) and a nice little resto it was too, I priced it at £60 with the radio and a copy manual, which I though was fair but for a couple of months I got no takers for it.

Then in the new year some guy contact me and at first he seemed up for buying as is so I sent him some better high res pics of it and he seemed happy until the time to talk turkey then he was moaning about having to buy a new chassis for £30 as the one on it was too scratched underneath too for his liking and would I do him a discount….

Now I'm going to take this opportunity to get something off my chest that has been bugging me for ages have a good olde RANT!!! :< why is it that No-one in TC is capable of paying the given price for anything!!! when ever I try to sell anything I always get the wise guys who think that all my prices are negotiable and thing that I’m fair game to have my prices shot down in flames, well I’ve got news for you folks... all my prices are FIXED at what I think is fair and reasonable for the car taking into account its condition and any time or money I've spent on doing it up, normally I will sell a car for roughly the same price as I bought it for, or in some cases what it owes me in terms of parts and labour it took me to fix the thing up, but its nice to make a bit of profit now and then, who doesn’t ;) but it seems that every time I get a willing buyer they turn out to be either Smart arse wise guys or the bleeding hearts cases who can't bring themselves to pay my more than reasonable asking prices :(

OK I could Ebay them, but sometimes that is even more of a lottery than selling through TC, I thing that this situation has been bought on by the mass media fore in this day and age we are all bombarded by consumer TV shows that tell you how to get things for less when you haggle or barter, this is a form of metal conditioning to make most people assume that’s the way the world at large works, but my point of view is if you went into a high street shop where they were selling a DVD you wanted for like £15.99 you would not take it up the cashier and say 'tell you what I'll give you £8 quid for it!!!' Its just not done, but then I hear you say that I’m selling used goods!! that much is true, and there is no precedence for pricing of used items, it’s a case of best judgement on what I think the car is realistically worth to me, but on the other hand I'm not a charity, and I'm sure as hell not gonna subsidise your future restoration of the car by selling to you for less so that you can spend the rest of the money you were going to give on the parts you need to bring the car upto your standard, I’ve done all that I’m prepared to do with that car and you have got to take that into consideration, any further work that you undertake on it has got to be paid out of your own pocket….

Further more you may be able to get a similar car off Ebay, but again I'm not an Online Auction, so don't expect me to just readily accept your next best bid!!! if you have Emailed me to make enquires about the model I have for sale then Ipsofacto you must have read the item description and seen the price I wanted for it, Now you must have been willing to pay my price in the first place to have proceeded further with the transaction, but this is where the cheeky sons of guns just can't resist a spot of bargain fishing and having a go..... why does this always happen to me :S

When I buy anything from a TC members trade room, I will always look at the price and only ask to buy if I’m willing to pay the going rate, I never ask for a discount, or say “will you take this much for it mate…..” if I’m not prepared to pay the asking price then simply won’t buying it, I just can’t understand why no-one seems to use the same sensible & honest system, if there are other honourable and just TC buyers out there I just have not come across them jet.

So what happened about the Boomerang? Well I first suggested to the guy that I could reduce the price if I removed the radio gear from the car and kept it, he agreed to this saying he had plenty of spare radios, then I kinda shot myself in the foot by saying that I could maybe knock another tenner off… now maybe I was thinking I can knock £10 if he still wants to keep the radio but now he latched onto this half hearted offer straight away and being a man of my word I begrudgingly sold him the car at the stupendously cheap price of £30, so in the end I gave him exactly what he wanted a Boomerang for 30 notes living him with £30 to spend on getting a new chassis for the thing, now at this point I’m gonna draw a line under the whole thing, and from now on all prices I quote are GOSPEL and in no way shape or form negotiable, thanks to this little piece of vitriolic rhetoric I will probably never be able to sell anything on Tamiyaclub again, but at least I have some way of letting people know about my ever growing frustration at the penny pinching nature of some Tamiyaclub members when it comes to offering to buy items you might have for sale.

There Rant over.