Brett Gideon: No more real bargains?

My father, who lives across the Tasman on the Sunshine Coast, is always regaling me with tales of his latest buy from the Salvos (i.e. the Salvation Army shop in Noosa). He pops in occasionally to buy a little something from them in an effort to pass some cash over the counter to help out and he’s picked up some bargains for under five bucks.

Most of his seven or eight printers came from the Salvos, usually discarded there because they weren’t working properly or just because they were old. Some of them came from the local council dump, where binned electronics in good nick are onsold. I forget what he paid for a mint high end HP Laserjet printer but it wasn’t much, a few dollars maybe. It works perfectly and has less than a month’s worth of use on it based on the duty cycle – a device that can deal with tens of thousands of pages a month for years isn’t much troubled by ten or twenty thousand pages all up.

He once gave me a Brother laser printer, which cost him five dollars and came with a small but annoying paper jam. Once he’d sorted it, I used it for nearly three years. Talk about a great buy. He bought a Pentax camera lens from the Salvos for a dollar last week and once he cleaned it up, it proved to be in perfect condition. A new equivalent costs hundreds of dollars.

So anyway, where am I going with this? Well, what are the odds of finding anything like this in your local Red Cross or Salvation Army shop in NZ? Not much I’d say because I’ve looked, I’m a big secondhand book and record buyer, so I’m often popping in to have a nosey but there’s not much in the way of electronics to be had besides old beige kettles and cracked toasted sandwich machines, all gummed up with decade old melted cheese.

That’s because anything electronic that is even vaguely worth something is on TradeMe and the sellers usually have a good idea of what they can get for it or they’re dreaming, which is even worse. Sure you might get a nice deal compared to the new price but good luck getting a quality lens in useable condition for a dollar. You won’t even get the plastic end cap, it’s true, take a look.

Maybe inorganic rubbish collection day is the way to pick up a real bargain in NZ? Anyone throwing out their old film SLRs and huge lens collection? I’ll take it off your hands today and I’ll collect it to save you a trip to the pavement. Now that’s a good deal!