A while back, I was on Gizmodo and found a company that was offering to trade used CDs for an iPod. Too good to be true? Millennium Music has their exchange rates posted for CDs to a number of iPod models (or you can just cash out if you want.) Basically, you package up your discs, mail ’em off to these guys. They evaluate them on quality of title and the physical quality of the disc.
Sounded like a pretty good deal to me. I’ve got a whole rack of CDs just gathering dust. Even if they only end up giving me $1 a disc, I’d pretty happy to unload them. (Selling them onesy twosy on eBay or Half.com is drag.) So, I spent a few hours matching up CDs to jewel boxes, swapping cracked jewel cases, and windexing off dust and smudges. I was interested in a new 30Gb iPod, so I picked out 130 CDs to ship out. I didn’t happen to have decent boxes and packing materials lying around, so I went to my local UPS Store. I was pleasantly surprised how reasonable it was to pack ($10) and ship ($25, insured for $500) 36 pounds of CDs.
A few days later, I got a call from Millennium Music. They got the CDs fine, but didn’t have a name to go along with the shipment. Geez, I meant to put a packing list in there; nutz! They tracked me down by the number on the UPS label. They’re supposed to line up the tracking number for the shipment with an email that you send them right after you ship. But, as I expected, the guy on the line told me they’ve been getting tons of email about the program and have been having trouble keeping up.
No biggie, I confirmed the tracking number and that was good enough for them. Even though the package had arrived late that morning, they told me that they had already evaluated my CDs by midafternoon. They offered me $280 for 118 of my CDs. They then confirmed that I was still interested in 30Gb iPod and told me the difference out of pocket would be $29 (including shipping for the iPod and return of the 12 CDs they didn’t want.) So, I said deal and gave them my credit card number for the difference.
A few days later a box shows up with my new iPod and returned CDs. I was a little disappointed to see that they used newspaper for padding the shipment; but, everything made it unscathed, so I’m pleased. I’m looking forward to whiling away some free time getting caught up on some videos I’ve been meaning to watch. Gonna have to put some time into getting that home made DVR together so I’ll have a good source for video content.
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