![]() Records I paid $20-$30 for a few years ago are sometimes elevated by bidding wars into hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Records that were a few dollars just six or seven years ago now seem to double in price every few months. Prices started to creep up in the first decade of this century and have now gone into hyperdrive. That’s largely due to online selling and an awareness by the retailers themselves of the current value of old vinyl – especially old New Zealand records. The classic age of opshop digging seems to have gone though, especially in the bigger cities. Even today, and especially with the so-called vinyl revival, collectors can be found trawling through these dusty boxes looking for forgotten or hard to find records. In the last few decades of the 20th century, the stores were a magnet for both casual and more determined record collectors. These days it’s as likely to be CDs although vinyl with the inevitable Nana Mouskouri, Kamahl, James Last and Seekers records still occupies a space in many. Prices started to creep up in the first decade of this century and have now gone into hyperdrive.Įach of these stores had (or has) a corner with at least two or three boxes of old discarded vinyl records. That’s mostly thanks to the internet, where the potential value of much of the “junk” on sale can be quickly assessed. They were plentiful – in the late 1990s Dominion Road in Auckland had a dozen or more. They still exist of course, but no longer in the same numbers, and they’re somewhat more structured and less jumbled than they once were. ![]() These secondhand and bric-a-brac stores often supported charities and could be found in every New Zealand suburb and town. There’s even a well-known Kiwi band named after them. Long before New Zealand had record fairs and online auction houses, we had hundreds of cluttered, dark and dusty opportunity shops, affectionately known by all as “opshops”.
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