 What's really the biggest problem in retro today? Certainly it has to be the gatekeepers and illustrious trolls who tell us the best ways to play our retro video games. Dude, don't even bother calling yourself a retro gamer unless you're playing on original hardware. No, it's not really them. Is it the astronomical pricing that is plaguing the CRT market? Those deadcub scalpers, man, they always ruin everything. No. Then of course it has to be the retro Illuminati. I can't say this in front of everybody. All right, so there's a secret cabal of three retro gaming YouTubers that controls the entire market. Maybe. How about all the amazing talented YouTubers who tell us about things and then all of a sudden cause huge market spikes in the price of said item or cause it to completely become unobtainium? Hey guys, have you ever heard of a convergence lens? Check out this cool item. You could use it to play Atari on your PVM. That's a good point, but not really the problem. No, folks. The real problem in the retro hobby today. Well, it's hard for me to say here in this studio, so let's get packed up and I'll just show you the problem. All right, we're here on location so I can finally show you what the real problem is and I'm going to show you this rather than talk about it because this kind of an issue can affect anybody. It doesn't matter whether you're the biggest YouTuber or just an everyday Joe. And I'll get into that a little bit more here in a second, but check this out. All right, example number one, this priceless, wonderful Olympus OEV CRT. It's a Sony PVM that's been rebranded by Olympus and it's an amazing CRT. When it comes in the way, it's supposed to be not like this. I mean, look at the damage to this thing. It's just ridiculous. All right, so what's the issue? Well, the issue is that there's poor packing practices on every single level. It doesn't matter where you're purchasing said retro hardware from. You're always concerned and scared. How is it going to arrive in shipping if I have to ship it? Yeah, so our friend here, Mr. Olympus OEV was unfortunately shipped by ground shipping and this one particularly left me sour because I had communicated with this eBay seller. I bought this on eBay and I said, if you have to ship at ground shipping, please make sure you're going to pack it well enough to be destroyed because that's what's going to happen. And obviously that's what did happen. The seller, of course, guaranteed me they knew how to pack these things and they would pack it properly. And as you can tell, they did that. Just kidding. They didn't do it at all. They wrapped it in a blanket and the blanket was actually in just this box with very little of this expandable foam, not even enough to really protect anything. Okay, the box itself is just a single layer box. The size isn't right. The amount of packing material is laughable. When you use this little amount of packing material, it's never going to arrive safely ground shipping. So what? You think that's the only one? Well, check this one out. This was the one that came right before that monitor. It's another Sony PVM, this time a smaller 13 inch PVM. Again, I was confirming with the seller if they could pack it properly. They assured me they could. And as you can see here, we have a cracked bezel. It has to be disassembled and this bezel needs to be repaired. And again, this one was an instance where basically no packing material was used. I mean very little. You had just a slight bit of bubble wrap around this and another really old box. And it just was guaranteed to be destroyed the minute it was leaving the seller's facility. And look, like I said, this affects everybody. I mean, check out this post from Linus at Linus Tech Tips. He had a very awesome retro computer with, of course, a CRT monitor that just showed up destroyed where it was packed in a box with old junk mail and advertising from local stores. But me and Linus, we're not the only ones experiencing these awesome transactions. I reached out to Twitter and asked everybody what their experience was with ground shipment and CRTs. And of course, I got loaded with positive experiences. No, I'm just kidding. Of course, it was a terrible post. People were squeamish, nerds everywhere shed a tear. So I'm going to go through and show you all the photographs that were given to me on that post. But I have to warn you, this is just sheer carnage, probably two minutes. Well, folks, that's it. And obviously, that's the biggest problem in retro. But seriously, it is a big problem. Shipping CRTs is a nightmare. And it does have a less than 50, 50% chance, even if it's packed properly to survive the ground shipment process. So what do we do about this? Of course, I wasn't going to leave you with a silly video about damage to CRTs without a solution to all this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a tutorial on how you can prevent all this damage and actually have a good experience shipping a retro electronic device that just can't handle the amount of abuse that the lovely ground shipment companies love to inflict on our merchandise. All right, everybody, as I promised, we're going to get in here. I'm going to show you the solution to avoiding the awful experience that you probably will have shipping your CRT or any other retro rare antique and using just standard ground shipping. We need to stay away from that if possible. All right, so our best option right now is to use a small shipment company. And really the easiest option at this point is to use a brokerage company that is going to find you a shipper. And that is U-SHIP. Now, look, this is not an advertisement for U-SHIP. Now, if U-SHIP wants to contact me about making a video for them, I don't mind it. I actually use U-SHIP. And that's the reason I'm going to show you how to do that is because I feel like the service that they offer is really going to be key for us to be able to keep this tech alive. I'm going to show you how to do a new shipment with them. And the first thing you want to do is create your own account if you're serious about shipping something or having something shipped to you. You'll want to create an account. So I already have an account because I've done a few shipments before. But once you do that, you can get into their programming and you can get a nice estimate with just a little bit of information. But I'm going to show you what you need to classify your item as. And we'll just get started right now with a new shipment. I'm clicking the Start a New Shipment here. And what we're going to do is we're going to click on household items under Furniture and Appliances. I select Home Electronics. You can even say that this item is on eBay. So if it's an auction item, you can list the auction item. And that's what I wanted to do with the last seller that sold me a PVM. I wanted to be able to use this feature and see how it works as a buyer because I've never had that opportunity. Unfortunately, you saw what happened. So hopefully we could try that some other time. But what we're going to do now is just try to get kind of an estimate for something. Shipment title. I usually do Sony CRT. And we're going to do one that is a PVM that's a 20-inch PVM. Okay. So that is going to have some pretty standard measurements. And I do believe it's the length on that is about two feet. I mean, it's not going to be any bigger than two feet. Width wise is about two feet. I mean, it's less than two feet, but that's fine. We'll do two feet for that. Weight on this CRT is, we'll put 55 pounds because that's about how much a 20-inch will weigh. Under the descriptions, you could put, no, the item is not pelletized. It's not created. It is not stackable. And add a description, a CRT. Monitor. Okay. And then you can even add a picture. So if you have a picture available, let's see if we can find an old picture. Well, I don't have a file for a picture, but if you have a picture of your CRT, you can definitely load it in there. All right. So I've gone ahead and prefilled in some data here for a pickup and delivery location. I'm actually using my old town of Hendersonville, Tennessee as one of the locations for this quote is where it would be picked up in. And then I gave a date of before the 28th, which is five days. So it's a five-day period from now till hopefully a pickup date. And I just put in the 90210 because of course everybody wants their PVM shipped to 90210. And I gave a delivery date of 315. Now if this gets picked up, they're not going to hold onto it that long. But let's just see what we get for a price here. We're going to go ahead and continue. And what they do is they give you a price, okay? You can get quotes over here, but I never get quotes, okay? The quoting system is okay, but you're going to get way higher rates for that. You need to set your own price here and take their average price into consideration. I usually try to get closer to this highest price point. I don't use the highest price point, $260 is how much I would offer on name your price. That way you're a little bit higher than the average. And then you are going to guarantee yourself a better chance of getting this picked up. Now once you do that, you would just type into 60, submit my offer, and there you go. So I just deleted that shipment. And that's how easy it is to get a rate. So just to ship a Sony PVM from Tennessee right outside of Nashville, all the way to Beverly Hills. And this is a 20-inch one. You're only looking at a $260 shipping fee. Now let me tell you, there is going to be a fee on top of that. I think it's like $25 generally for a booking fee. So you can expect to pay $260 plus a $25 booking fee. Plus if you want to add extended insurance coverage, that's also available. Now I really don't see a reason to do that most of the time. But if you want to, that's even available where really if anything happens to the item, it'll be covered under an extended insurance policy. So you can get that and that's generally about $50 extra. So the most you're looking at is probably about $335 to ship this across the country safely. And to guarantee again that it will get there. But you don't have to do anything as far as packing the CRT. That's another great thing about it. Generally when you ship these things on a service like U-Ship for a CRT specifically, you cannot even pack the item. And you can send it just as it is. They will blanket wrap it and generally put it in the cab of their vehicle when they come and pick it up. And they treat it like an antique. So it's very, very high quality service. And what they do is they take it from your pickup location. They drive it straight to the delivery location. So it doesn't get offloaded and sorted and destroyed and then put on another truck and then driven all around town all day. And then finally, you're the last stop of the week that gets your destroyed CRT like it always happens with ground shipping. I will do a follow-up video on an actual shipment that I do next time through U-Ship. So I can show you how the process goes because there's an application that goes with this and it's really great. It updates you on everything and you can communicate directly with your driver very easily through the application. So it's just a lot of good stuff. So if this video does well and people have a request for a deep dive on using U-Ship, I'll be glad to provide that. But that's going to do it for today. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content. What is the biggest problem in retro today? What is the biggest problem in retro today? What is the biggest problem in retro today? So there's an entire cabal of only three retro gaming YouTubers who control the entire market. How's my hair looking?