Second Hand Dealers

• an image archive might go on to shape contemporary visions
• today’s “accidents” might be the basis for tomorrow’s collective understanding.
• objects as guardians of personal life stories

• Secondhand Goods Dealers Transaction Records System (SHOTS)
• Stolen and Lost Property Index (SPEX)

• Urgency: When I look at the decorative bric-a-brac section, I feel it is like going to a museum or gallery. Except that in this case, once you miss the show, the object is going to be gone forever! It is going to be sold soon (probably) and maybe even be resold again after. Its imminent circulation gives a sense of urgency, gives it value.
• The scope of goods traded at Cash Converters -> Today’s decorative impulse buy might circulate onwards to become someone’s lived domestic reality.

• DeepDreamxCashConverter?

Questions:

On the documentation process RECORDING (Name, Description)

• How do you record an object when it comes to your buy counter?
• Is it assigned a number? Keywords? Categories?
• Is there an Inventory Sheet or Card or Form? What does it look like?
• How is it documented?

IMAGE (Representation)

• Is a photo taken?
• Where does this photo go? Is there a central database?
• When did this database first go digital and then online?
• (How do items make it on the website?)

VOLUME

• Approximately how many items are taken in at each buy counter in each outlet daily?

VALUATION

• Is there an internal chart you have?
• How are your staff trained to price the goods?
• Do staff often come experienced as secondhand dealers themselves?

• On the list of items of items you don’t buy:
• Why are Secondhand clothing & shoes are not traded?

• Is there a size limit? How big an object would you be happy to take in if you did a home visit and they had something truly huge? (eg: grand piano?) Or will you take anything that can fit into a van? (Or will this become clear when we see the showroom?)

• What is the most absurd thing that people have brought to your counters that you had to turn away? (Or, if this is something managed by individual staff, who could I write to, to ask about this?)

• On Fake products: there is often a grey area especially in the Household Wares & Display Items category… how do you define fake?
• On Replicas: How do you value replicas?

• On provenance: About Secondhand Goods Dealers Transaction Records System (SHOTS) and Stolen and Lost Property Index (SPEX), are there many people who try to sell stolen goods? Do your staff try to ask people about the origins of goods which they suspect are stolen?

• Are there objects that never seem to leave your shelf? What are the objects you find hard to sell? (Or perhaps you have very savvy staff and people are always buying things and this is never an issue)

• Are there repeat appearances by objects? Do they circulate back? Could you detect them if they were returned or sold back?

 

• On the geodes and fengshui rocks – I’m really fascinated by these rocks in particular, as I’ve seen them being sold but as I am not religious or superstitious I was very surprised to see them also enter the second hand market. Are they still effective second hand?
• Why did they get sold?
• did the owner fall on hard times (if so, does the pricing of the fengshui rock reflect this)
• did someone who is not superstitious sell off a job lot of one person’s rock collection? Perhaps someone was discarding a collection that one time? Or are these fengshui (rocks commonly seen across all the CC outlets?

Random thoughts

To train an RNN model an ideal test set would be about 5000 I’ll be happy with at least 1000 as a human data collector.