There used to be a used book store down the street from me and once a month the owner would go to a book sale and buy used books to restock the store. As low as his prices were, he couldn't have been paying more than $.50 for a paperback and $1 for a hardcover.
I did a search and the closest I found was buying books by the pallet on e-bay. Have any of you ever gone to one of these book sales and how do I find them? This wasn't like when a library sells books, this was a company that went around buying up books from several sources and then reselling them in bulk to small book stores. He used to get a lot of used books that were less than a year old.
ETA: I'm glad I wrote this because it reminded me of something the owner told me when I asked how he could sell books at such low prices. He told me the local Goodwill bookstore also used to go to these sales because he used to work for Goodwill and was the one doing it. Maybe someone at Goodwill can tell me.
I always felt bad for the guy because he had no business sense. It was obvious he was losing money on a daily basis. He had a really nice store that was usually fully stocked, but he was charging about half of what he should have been charging. I could buy a hardcover book for about $3.00 and then I got a 50% credit when I traded it in on a new book. So he was probably paying $1 for the book and making between $.50 and $.75 per book. That probably didn't even cover his expense of driving to the book sales, much less the store, utilities, insurance, and employee.
I did a search and the closest I found was buying books by the pallet on e-bay. Have any of you ever gone to one of these book sales and how do I find them? This wasn't like when a library sells books, this was a company that went around buying up books from several sources and then reselling them in bulk to small book stores. He used to get a lot of used books that were less than a year old.
ETA: I'm glad I wrote this because it reminded me of something the owner told me when I asked how he could sell books at such low prices. He told me the local Goodwill bookstore also used to go to these sales because he used to work for Goodwill and was the one doing it. Maybe someone at Goodwill can tell me.
I always felt bad for the guy because he had no business sense. It was obvious he was losing money on a daily basis. He had a really nice store that was usually fully stocked, but he was charging about half of what he should have been charging. I could buy a hardcover book for about $3.00 and then I got a 50% credit when I traded it in on a new book. So he was probably paying $1 for the book and making between $.50 and $.75 per book. That probably didn't even cover his expense of driving to the book sales, much less the store, utilities, insurance, and employee.
