Oh and yes, it’s a rather negative rant and it kinda involves national economics, so don’t say that I didn’t warn you…So, what’s the problem you ask? After all, people sell stuff online all around the world. The prices for each product in most cases vary from country to country, from continent to continent, mostly according to their age, availability (or in some cases rarity) and the national economy state (e.g. when the economy’s growing strong, prices of products often go up, simply because people can afford it and the opposite when the economy is weak). That’s normal and of course in Poland the same simple pricing rules for used goods exist… except, in my humble opinion, for people who sell audio stuff, especially the vintage kind.

So, what do they do? I’d divide Polish audio sellers into 3 groups:

The first one respects the price rules as for any other product. They’re OK.

The second one are guys who have bought their precious items personally abroad a few years back and now they won’t sell them for less than half the price for which they’ve originally bought them and boast in the item’s description something like: “I’ve payed for this 2000 marks/franks/rubles!”. In most cases these people omit commenting at since when they actually own the item. These people also don’t seem to know anything about inflation and similar economic mechanisms.

The third group is what I’d like to call the “genius group”. Those are guys who are virtually changing the country’s economy for the better, bringing it up to the same level as Germany, the United Kingdom or even the United States. How do they manage to do that? Simple. They first check how much they would get for their stuff if they’d live in, for example, the USA. Clickety-click they go online to ebay.com and others to check the prices. They look at the maximum possible amount. Never mind if the sold item is like in mint condition or comes with the original manuals and packaging and all that extra stuff, in most cases the Polish seller’s item doesn’t meet any of these qualities. They also check the prices at places in other countries, just to make sure if they really found the highest possible price. Then, when they’re satisfied with the prices of the foreign sellers, they convert the highest price to Polish currency (the Zloty) and put it on an online auction in Poland for that price. Makes sense? Not the least in my opinion.

Sometimes the “geniuses” start out by playing “smart” and set the starting price lower and setting their “foreign price” as the bid criteria. I also have found several sellers who write in their item descriptions statements like this one:

“Many people have been asking me what price would interest me in order to close down the auction/sale early. The price that interests me is the one which I would get on foreign sales websites and nothing less.”

So what should the potential buyer do now? Should he/she him-/herself check-out the prices on the mentioned “foreign sales websites” before bidding? Probably so, if he/she finds himself with such a lazy and sneaky seller.

I hope that you guys catch my drift here about this issue. I can understand the guys from the 2nd group, but I seriously despise of the “geniuses”. They seem to live in their own imaginary world where Polish average wages and salaries are equal to those earned by wealthy Western countries, cause only if we take such a thinking scheme into account do those “price huntings” make sense. Unfortunately, Poland is not and for a long time (if ever) won’t be in the top ten GDP countries list, so such a pricing policy is nothing less than smart-ass stupidity.

I’m not saying that those guys don’t sell anything, they do, because people in most cases don’t know how much in Polish money is the given item worth, so they trust the seller’s pricing policy and judgment. I know this is unfair, but do people have a choice? In most cases, shipping from foreign countries is pretty expensive by Polish standards, thanks to which the Polish audio sellers can easily setup an oligopoly, meaning that there is small competition and they can dictate unfair prices in their specific market.

That’s all I guess. I know that most people who visit and read my blog are not from Poland so I’d like to ask you guys this: Have you ever observed or experienced such or similar selling behavior in your country? I’m asking not only about audio stuff here, any kind of item market would do good as an example.

Also, maybe I’m wrong in my opinions and what the “geniuses” do is perfectly normal and understandable? If that’s the case then please correct my reasoning.

PS: Till this moment I was sure that the proper spelling of the word judgment is “judgement”. It’s good that my web browser has a built-in spell checker. Thanks spell checker!

This week I finally got a pair of loudspeakers for my receiver. I’ve also done some cable huntin’ in Warsaw. Thought it would be easy in such a big city. I never thought that I’d start to despise the city street planning afterwards…

Let’s start with the speakers. In my previous post, I mentioned that I bought them on an internet auction just after Christmas. Well, the seller told me last Tuesday that he’d send them on the next day with UPS. I thought that it was fairly possible that the package would be delivered before Sunday, but in order to know that for sure, I’d need the tracking number of the package (or to be precise: packages, cause the speakers are quite big and they wouldn’t fit in one single package). One quick e-mail to the seller and I have the number.

On Friday, I went to UPS’s homepage for operations in Poland, typed-in the number and the reaction here should be like: “Voila!”, but instead was more like “Umm …. m’kay … Who? What? Where?”. I never thought that such an esteemed courier and mail company such as UPS would have such a shitty tracking interface for their customers and I don’t mean the layout of the page. After typing in the tracking number I was presented with a small table which included these columns: date and time of given event, place, description of event. What about the content of this table ? I could only gather that my package was picked-up on Thursday, sent to some place vaguely coded “STA” (I know the seller lives near Szczecin, a city in the far north-western side of Poland and by looking at a map I couldn’t think of any place near there which could have a shortcut of “STA”). Then, after a few hours, my package was still in “STA”, but now the decription said that it was: “Loaded on LH “. Question is: what’s LH ? At this point I really didn’t know what was going on and started looking for help on the website. I mean, they should at least have some legend for their tracking system or something, right? Well, after looking through every FAQ and page marked with “help” or “support” or “customer”, it seems that they don’t. How the hell should an online tracking system be useful to a customer if you’d have to be at least a UPS employee to understand it? I really can’t comprehend the logic behind this feature. Anyway, on Saturday I checked again and there was a new event. This time, the loudspeakers arrived late at night in “WAW” (this time I guessed right that WAW stands for Warsaw, as the Polish name of the city is: Warszawa and people often tend to say “Wawa” as a popular shortcut from the full version) and were being “Loaded on HUB 05″. Again, I don’t know that exactly does “HUB 05″ mean, but at least I’m fairly confident that they arrived in my city. Then I started wondering when will the packages reach their final destination (i.e. my address). I decided to call the UPS hotline and after 4 tries (I only have a cellphone and it seems that the operator rejected the hotline number at first. Weird.), a woman with a nice voice answered. She told me that the delivery will be made on Tuesday. OK, no prob, seems only fare that the delivery guys have a day off on Monday, it being the 1st of January and all.

On Monday, it came to me that even if the speakers will arrive tomorrow, I don’t have any cables with which to connect them to the receiver! I’d also be needing some kind of music source and as my computer’s the only one here at Warsaw (for now), I’d also be needing an IC (InterConnect) cable to connect it too. I’m not from Warsaw, but I was aware that there are some audio-video stores around here, so I started googling for some which also provide a variety of cables. I’ve found one such store which was located on the same street as the subway exit, to which I commute daily in order to get to my college. I jotted down the address of the store and decided to go there on the next day, after classes.

On Tuesday, the courier called my cell while I had a break between classes. He wanted to set a time for the delivery to take place. I told him that I’ll be at home after 3 pm and he replied that if he wouldn’t make it by then, he’d arrive at about 6 pm. After classes, I made my way to the street on which the audio store was located. It was at Warynska Street 10. I see around the corner that I’m standing next to bulding no. 3 and that the next along the road is no. 4, so I go that way. By arriving at no. 9, the next structure was already under a new street name. Figuring that no. 10 would be on the other side of the street, I crossed it, but found no. 42. Went back to where I came from on this side and went further, till I found no. 11. Passing that building, I find that the next building is also under a different street name. “What gives?”, I thought to myself. Too bad that I forgot to take my trusty city map. I started asking passers-by about it, but they didn’t know also. I started to search around in-between the small alleys near no. 11, but to no avail. Fortunately, I found a kiosk and there, a young guy behind the counter told me that it was further down the road after the big street-crossing. Thanks to these directions I’ve finally managed to find the store. Went in, asked about speaker cables, bought 2.5 meters of a cable called “Monitor Atmos Air 309 Cu”. I’ve read about it in a magazine some time ago and it’s presumably a good OFC (Oxygen Free Copper) cable made by a German company called in-akustik and it also happened to be one of the cheapest in that particular shop (it has a price of about 9 bucks per meter). I’ve also asked about a 3.5” jack (also called a “small jack”; the small cable plug that you find in computer soundcards and portable music devices) to 2x RCA (also called “cinch” cables; the cable plugs that you find on audio components) IC, but unfortunately they didn’t have anything with a 3.5” jack…

Later that day, the UPS guy came (just after 3pm). He brought in 2 big packages and I was feeling like it was Christmas again. The unpacking of both packages took me almost an hour, because the loudspeakers were packed very securely (they were wrapped in 3 layers of packing foil and 2 layers of cardboard and that all was surrounded by loads of thick cotton). Thanks to that, no harm occured to them during delivery.

After unpacking (5 pm), I decided to go to the local mall in search of an IC. They didn’t have one, so I just bought some food supplies, which turned out not to be such a good idea at this particular time, because the lines to the cash registers were so long that I spent an hour standing in them. Near the exit, I’ve spotted a small electical appliances shop. They had the IC that I was looking for, but it was only 5 meters long and I needed at least 8 meters of cable in order to lay it around my room (the computer and receiver stand next to opposite walls). When I got home, I googled around once again and I’ve found a cable store in Warsaw that had such interconnects in stock.

On Wednesday, I decided to go to the shop, which I found on the net the day before. Classes end at half past 3 pm at that day, so it was already getting dark. Went to the subway, comuted to a station nearest to the shop’s street and started searching for it, this time with the city map. It was a long trek, took me over an hour to get to the street. It was pretty far of the subway line and I didn’t want to take the risk of taking a bus (I don’t trust buses very much, especially ones that drive through bus lines that I don’t know). The shop’s address was Korotynska Street 23, room 41. I found myself near building no. 16, so I continued walking along the road. I finally came to no. 22, but the next one was no. 24. “What happened to 23?”, I thought. I looked on the other side of the street, but there was a big park there. Just when I wanted to go and search in-between the apartment buildings, a man passed me. I quickly asked him if he knew where no. 23 was. He replied that it was on the other side and the other end of Korotynska Street. I thanked him for the directions, but boy was I mad. Can’t they just tag the house numbers in a more logical order here in Warsaw? Why do they make the street address numbering scheme look like a jigsaw puzzle? Anyway, after a long walk I found building 23. It was a 2 story high barrack-like steel building (looked like it was built back in the socialistic days). I asked a guy who had a TV repair shop located in the building where could I find the cable store. He directed me to a staircase around the corner. Went there and upon entrance, the janitor asked me what was I looking for. She directed me to room 41. I was very happy while finally reaching my destination and just before 5 pm (the store closes at that time). The store consisted of 3 rooms, the one with the exit door being the main sales room with some packed cables hanging around the walls, a neat-dressed guy behind a desk and a computer and some filing cabinets behind him. The 2 other rooms were on the left and right of the main room and there were tons of cardboard boxes in them, presumably packed with audio-video cables. They had the cable I was looking for (10 meters long), but it cost $15 and I didn’t have such an amount of cash by me. Unfortunately, they didn’t take cards, so I asked where’s the nearest ATM. They pointed me to a gas station, near a street crossing halfway of Korotynska Street. Luckily, they also said that they’d be working over-time that day, so the store will be open for another hour. I went back to the crossing, found the gas station, but no ATM was there. I noticed there was a bank on the other side of the road. That was probably what the cable salesman ment. I found that there were 3 banks against each other, taking up the ground floor of a building and one of them was the bank in which I had my personal account. Turned out that the ATM there was broken, so I went to one of the other banks to use one of their ATMs. Took out $20, payed about $2 commision in the process for withdrawing money from a competitor’s machine and off I went back to the shop. Went in, payed the man and off I went. Mission completed! It was already 6 pm and I was really exhausted from all that walking around, so I decided to take a bus the the subway station. I arrived at my district at 7 pm, was extremely hungry, because last time I ate was over 10 hours before so instead of going home and making some dinner-supper combination, I went to a local pizza parlor. When I got home, I unpacked the newly acquired cable, layed it around the room and connected to the receiver. Next, I took my swiss army knife, cut the speaker cable in half and cut off the cable isolation on both ends. While hooking up the first speaker, 2 things occured. One was that the cable was a bit too short. The other was that it was too thick and I couldn’t fit it in the receiver’s speaker cable terminals. Tough luck. It became even tougher later, because I suffered from a terrible and sudden tooth-acke during the night.

Thursday, “another day, another cable”, I said to myself. Thanks to the tooth-acke, I fell asleep at 6 am, only to wake up at 10 to get to classes. Went back to the audio store on Warynska St. after classes. Bought 4 meters of the slightly cheaper Monitor Atmos Air 195 Cu cable (it’s got a smaller diameter). Comuted back home, ate some dumplings for dinner (Polish “pierogi” are the best), went to the dentist, came back at 6 pm and fell quickly asleep.

Friday, woke up at 8 am, made my bed and immediatelly started to get it on with the speaker cable. Again, cut the cable in half and cut of the isolation on the ends. I’ve cut my fingers 3 times in the process, but this finally worked and I got my speakers hooked-up. YAY!

I didn’t have enough time to thoroughly listen to my new speaker-receiver combination, so I still can’t tell you my first impressions in detail… One thing for sure is that now the gates to buying a turntable and CD player are open, so I may start collecting CDs and vinyl records again here in Warsaw!

Phew, this turned out to be a big post. At least now you know how demanding and tiresome this hobby can be. I never thought that I’d have such a hard time with such a trivial thing as cables here in the capitol of Poland … or maybe it’s just that I’m new here. Wonder if anybody will even read this post to the end…