In the inaugural On The Cheap, I told you how to get an iPad 2 for less than $105 via PowerMax. However, they just deal with Macs. What if you want to save on something else? Let’s check out some options. To figure pricing, I’m going to use that same iPad2 and the items I used to get it.
Best Buy has a Trade in site that I can plug in the stats on the items I traded in to PowerMax, and they valued my stuff at a total of about $80. That’s a huge difference of $500! My iPad, according to them, is worth a $320 gift card or a $208 check. This is clearly not an awesome deal for trading. However, the option of getting a check instead of credit makes this an option worth holding onto.
Radio Shack has no interest in my iMac G4, but the Mac Mini and iBook net about $150, altogether. That’s better than Best Buy, but nowhere near as good as PowerMax. And while Radio Shack values the iPad 2 at a lower price of $350, the store doesn’t offer checks, as near as I can tell. So, if you’re out for cash, Best Buy is the best option. If you plan on upgrading a phone, keep Radio Shack in mind. A while ago, they gave $100 off the price of an Evo3D for the trade-in of an EVO or EVO Shift. There were even scattered reports of people getting as much as $158 off when they brought the original boxes.
Missed Connection: We locked eyes as I admired your RAM.
In New York City, there’s a place called CEX, a sort of tech-focused pawn shop. The advantage this place has over Best Buy and Radio Shack is that the asking prices for what you’d buy are generally lower. However, they also accept less. There was no quote online for my iMac or iBook, and the Mac Mini was worth about $105. CEX does have the best price for the iPad 2, quoting me $585, an actual greater value than my original trade-ins (but not shipping). This is likely due to how in demand the device is now more than anything else.
None of those are really good enough deals to warrant going to the bother, if you ask me. There’s another option though, and that’s a true trade-in: barter. If you bypass the sites and go right to your fellow man, you can generally get a pretty good deal. The easiest way to barter that I’ve found is Craigslist, but you have to be very careful of frauds. Do everything in person, and only meet in public places. You can also try Freecycle for trades, but you’re likely to be less successful than Craigslist.
Maybe trade-ins and barter aren’t for everyone or for every situation. Still, it really can’t hurt to try. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go finish boxing up an old PowerBook.
Perhaps ironically, it’s my recently increasing dissatisfaction with Amazon, eBay and Craigslist as selling tools that’s leading me to consider these stores offering trade-in/trade-up programs for the first time.
I sold an absolutely mint condition Macbook Pro 15″ (2009 model) to a guy on Amazon, and to this day, the guy STILL sends me emails through Amazon’s “contact seller” links, complaining about the machine. I spent over an hour in long distance phone calls with this guy before he agreed to click the “buy” option, because he claimed he was scammed last time he tried to buy one on eBay, and was really nervous about it. (Fine… I understood that. So we went over every last detail of my machine; what all the specs were, any small scuffs or scratches I could see on the bottom of the case, etc. etc.) Well, a week or two after he gets it, he’s asking me about 2 or 3 pages of problems he claimed he was having with it including freezes/crashes, a “cloudy looking screen”, keyboard keys he said were slightly slanted or crooked, and some issue about it taking several seconds to switch audio over when he plugged in a headphone jack. I did my best to suggest some things to try or check — and he disappeared for a while. (Thankfully, long enough so Amazon would no longer allow him to demand a refund from me.) But he randomly writes me, insisting I sold him a machine assembled out of untested spare parts, and other nonsense. He’s just psycho!
And eBay? Ugh.. Last time I sold a lousy mini DVI to DVI adapter cable on there, the guy buying it won it for about $5 — and then demanded a refund because I described it improperly. (I accidentally typed mini-displayport instead of mini-DVI in my description, yet the photo I included let you clearly see which cable it was.) Technically, yeah, I screwed up … but come on! He could just resell the thing (likely at a profit) to someone else locally rather than go through shipping it back for $5! I wound up losing the money I spent to ship it to him, and had to hope he was even going to really return it to me after I refunded him. (He finally did – but took his sweet time mailing it back.) Experiences like that make me inclined not to bother with it anymore.
That first guy is one of the reasons I don’t eBay as much as I used to. So many nutters.
Nice article, I’m surprised you didn’t mention Gazelle, I keep seeing/hearing their ads on various podcasts. The prices they offer are only decent for recent products, anything over a couple years old will most likely only get you a buck or two or they’ll offer to send you a box to ship it to them for recycling. Nice thing is they pay shipping. I was surprised they offered me $3 for an HP financial calculator I bought in college, funny thing is Staples still sells the same model for $70 new and the specific model has been around since the 1970’s.
Craigslist is one of the strangest ways to do anything, I’ve gotten a few good deals buying stuff but had nothing but nightmares getting rid of stuff.