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Here is the clearest answer I have come up with in the course of fielding dozens and dozens of "how much do you want for it?" questions:
In the end, what I want you to do is figure out the most you would be comfortable paying and pay that amount and not a penny more, or a penny less. There is no possibility of insult here. So far, I have let the buyer dictate the terms of sale on every item, and that has felt excellent. Only one person has totally failed to get it. So it goes. Stuff is a river, you dip your net and pull up what comes up. Customers are a river, you put out your stuff and people walk by and eventually someone stops and gets something they want. I assume that this stuff will find happy owners, but the site exists as a social experiment as well as a vehicle for transferring material property out of my world into your world, and cash out of your bank accounts into mine.
For a more concrete example, try this example of an offer that I found very easy to accept even though it is probably miles below what these two amps might bring on Ebay:
"As far as my offer, I think it is reasonably fair. Mark IV's in good stock condition seem to be selling in the low $200's, so $150 for a non-stock unit seemed reasonable. I had no idea how much the Scott 240 might be worth, so I asked some very knowledgeable Scott addicts that I know online, and they said anywhere from $150 to perhaps $300 depending on condition. So that's how I came up with my $300 combined offer."
Which I accepted.
Because I am in fact NOT in the game of getting the highest possible price - if I were playing that game I would be playing on Ebay. I like Ebay in some ways, but I am neither willing to pay Ebay prices nor waste my life searching, waiting for stuff to appear on Ebay, nor I am willing to suffer my way through the adrenalin of watching my high bid evaporate and the bid-prices go thru the roof in the last few minutes. Not my idea of fun.
If you found me with a google search and didn't get to the pages on the site that explain what I am up to, and why, when you finish reading this page you are on, start with the text on the website's opening page.
This site really IS a social experiment. In the course of setting up this system to dispose of most of my accumulation of material-plane possessions (and I am serious that I want to get my collection of stuff "managable" and my tendency to collect stuff "under control") I have come to several conclusions that appear to be worth sharing.
The thought process that led me to these conclusions began several years ago, in the aftermath of the first in a long series of break-in burglaries at my house and shop.
What I realized, and what I wrote at the time, was that the most important loss - what had been taken from me that ultimately mattered even more to me than the items themselves - was my role in the business of deciding who got them next, and under what terms these things would be transferred. For example, I had already "gifted" the brown-face Fender Super to blues-legend Alice Stuart, who had been plagued with amp troubles for years, but she didn't make it back to P.T. in time to pick it up before they stole it.
It has taken me a couple more years to stumble upon the right words to express the reason why this was true, that my role in the business of deciding who gets them next, and the terms of the transfer, matters because it involves the stories these things had accumulated under my stewardship. Because the most important thing that these things do for people is accumulate stories.
Most methods of commerce and most commercial thing-transfer processes deliberately strip the things of their stories. Used car salesmen strip the story off the car, Realtors strip the majority of the story off the house (like the crazy neighbors who has his yard ringed with motion-sensitive floodlights and runs his outboard motor on weekends or the impossible-to-thaw-once-frozen water-pipes), and pawn shops and music stores strip the stories off their musical instruments and their amplifiers, antique dealers make up stories about the past owners. A lot of my stolen possessions apparently got sold at yard sales, stripped of their stories. That loss of connection to the past, to the stories, is almost always unfortunate, sometimes it's probably criminal and I actually think it is largely avoidable. This dialogue is part of it.
Joe Breskin Port Townsend January 2004
This site is seriously under construction and I will be rather amazed if the links work. If a link 404s for you, let me know, or simply try another path.