Coast Steve said:
I just made a VERY good offer on this one and it got turned down right away by default....Another seller on glue.
From what I see, a new seller posting a box on e-bay checks first to see what they are going for, and just keeps the stupidity going by following along with the price.
They DON'T SELL for these asking prices, and NEVER will.
I'm not going to say that your offer isn't a reasonable one, but I will say that your offer amounts to only $909 USD, which is hardly a can't refuse type of offer, could go either way. I see sales exceeding that amount frequently. So if you wanna believe that they never sell for these amounts, then you are free to keep on thinking that way. 5 digits, doubtful any current boxes would sell for that much, although a couple of RF-9000's have actually sold for over $10,000. A fully working CR-V21 could fetch $4~$6k. I could recall many GF-1000/909 sales exceeding $1000 USD and that was a decade ago. Those days, top of the line boomboxes went on sale all the time. I remember going to Partstore and ordering the GF-777 service manual, I bought 2 of them. Can you do that today? Not for a long time already. These days, the top high in demand boxes are virtually all collected out and few real steals are available anymore, most being offered by restorers or collectors. It's all about supply and demand and you aren't the only one to come here in recent times, asking to buy a top box, without doing any of the work. Bottom line is that collectors frequently have spent many years, decades even building their collections. Sometimes, the top boxes you see took years to find, and built out from many examples of subpar units to make into one complete unit. Also, many restored examples were completely stripped to be washed, cleaned, rebelted, and repainted or refinished. In these cases, countless hours of labor could have been expended to arrive to that point. If the time spent was valued at $75/hour, or whatever technicians rates are these days, the boombox would be priceless. However, even if you devalue the labor to some minuscule $5/hr or some small amount, it still amounts to something. I can tell you this, I have a couple of GF-777s here in very good condition, and I haven't even started any restoration on them. For either of them, I wouldn't accept anything less than $1k and if they were to receive a complete cleaning and service, you can be certain that I would want more. If you think that's too much, it's no problem. See, they've been with me forever already, what's a few more years. Also, there's something you don't know as a new intro into the hobby. These GF series have some idiosyncratic issues that always manifest on high mileage units, is that the doors wear and either no longer align properly causing eject issues or doors popping off hinges. These aren't minor issues since the mechanical attachment points wear and are part of the body. You can't replace a screw or piece of hardware to replace. I carefully selected my units to ensure they are free of these issues. Didn't know that? Well if that's the case, then how do you know which ones are keepers and which ones have these issues, since they all look the same externally? Are there other problems with these units? You betcha, but I guess you'll just have to spend more time in the archives doing research, or just learn from experience like all these other decades old collectors.
I will say this, when these high price listings first started, people used to chuckle all the time and poke fun. Today, you should take a look at eBays search feature and just check boombox (sold listings, sorted high-low). That will give you an idea of whether or not people are actually buying these things and while not all sold results are believable, there are enough sold listings in the 4-digit area that support my observation that boombox prices are actually going in an upward trajectory, specifically for the TOTL boxes. If you want cheap(er) boombox, buy those that are in need of some attention, eventually they all need it. You may even need to buy several to combine them into a complete one as many are missing parts. But if you want one in which someone already did all the hard work and spent all the years to arrive at... be prepared to pay for it. Just saying.....
