Dick Smith, formerly a major electronics retailer in Australia, recently decided to close every single one of its bricks-and-mortar stores. They’re selling off everything in their warehouses that can be sold, and I mean everything.
Up to and including these tattered, dog-eared, old-ass PS1 link cables, whose presence on a retail shelf in 2016 is a marvel of persistence.
Via Kotaku AU, a store in Perth apparently had some of these out the back, left over from when they took on another retailer’s old stock a few years ago. Despite the shitty state of those boxes (years of being unsold and shifted between stores will take its toll), they’re being sold “new”, in so much as they’ve never been purchased by a customer.
If you’re wondering about those crazy prices, this Redditor explains that’s a result of Dick Smith’s administrators (the people tasked with selling off the dead company’s stock) having to apply the item’s last-known retail price, which back in the 20th century was $60.
I can understand how these were never sold, but how were they never thrown out? Maybe that’s something Pixar need to look at for their next movie, a sad tale of unloved and unsold PS1 accessories left behind as everything else, from third-party PS2 controllers to Xbox microphones, is sold around them.
I remember in a previous life, when I worked at EB Games/GameStop, calling up half the stores in Australia ordering random leftover Dreamcast games. I thought that was fun, but they’d only been dead a few years at the time, not decades. Any other retail workers—and I’m talking sales of “new” gear, not pre-owned/retro—out there ever see/sell anything as old as these?