Last Record Store Day, I watched a bloke walk out of my shop with eight records. He didn’t look at a single one beyond checking the title against his phone screen. He was in and out in three minutes. By the time I closed the shop that evening, six of those titles were already listed on Discogs at double the retail price.

I know this because a regular customer showed me the listings, furious that she’d missed out on a record she actually wanted to listen to because someone who had zero interest in the music got there first.

This is the flipper problem, and it’s getting worse.

What Flipping Actually Is

Record flipping is buying limited edition vinyl at retail price with the sole intention of reselling at a markup. It’s not new — people have been doing it with concert tickets, sneakers, and collectibles forever. But in the vinyl world, it’s become a genuine problem that distorts the market and undermines the culture.

The mechanics are simple. Limited editions announced in advance. Fixed retail prices. Predictable demand. The flipper buys at $40, lists at $80-120 on Discogs, and pockets the difference. No love for the music required.

Why It Matters

Flipping takes records out of the hands of people who want to listen to them and puts them in the hands of people who want to profit from them. That’s a value transfer from music fans to speculators, and it degrades the culture around physical music.

For independent shops, flippers are a double-edged problem. They drive traffic on release days (good for the till), but they create frustration and resentment among regular customers who miss out (bad for relationships). When a loyal customer who’s been shopping with me for years can’t get a record because a flipper grabbed the last copy, that damages trust.

For artists and labels, flipping means the premium that the secondary market captures goes entirely to the flipper, not back to the creator. An artist who priced their limited vinyl at $40 because they wanted it to be accessible sees that pricing intention undermined by someone selling it for $100 the next day.

The Record Store Day Connection

Record Store Day has become the primary event around which flipping activity concentrates. The combination of announced limited editions, fixed quantities, and a single-day release creates the perfect conditions for speculation.

I’ve implemented policies to combat this — one copy per title per customer, no holds, no phone orders on RSD stock. Other shops have gone further with wristband systems, pre-registration, and even lottery systems for the most in-demand titles.

But none of these fully solve the problem. A determined flipper can send friends and family to buy on their behalf, or simply visit multiple shops across a city.

The Discogs Dimension

Discogs is both the problem and an essential tool. The platform makes flipping easy by providing a global marketplace with transparent pricing data. A flipper can check what a title is selling for before they even buy it, calculating their profit margin in advance.

But Discogs is also indispensable for legitimate collectors. It’s the best database and marketplace for vinyl, and it would be unreasonable to blame the platform for human behaviour.

What Discogs could do is implement a waiting period for new releases — preventing items released in the past 30 days from being listed for sale above retail price, for example. This wouldn’t eliminate flipping, but it would reduce the most egregious Day 1 profit-taking.

What Real Collectors Can Do

Don’t buy from flippers. If a record was released yesterday and it’s listed at twice the price, wait. Demand-driven pricing on Discogs usually peaks in the first week and then drops as the initial hype subsides. Patience is the flipper’s enemy.

Support shops that fight flipping. Choose shops that implement fair purchasing policies and limit quantities. These policies exist to protect real customers.

Buy what you want to listen to. If everyone in the market was buying vinyl to play rather than to profit, the flipper economy would collapse overnight.

Report suspicious activity. If you see a Discogs seller listing dozens of copies of a limited release, report it. While Discogs can’t prevent all flipping, community reporting helps identify the worst offenders.

My Position

I think flipping is fundamentally incompatible with the values of record store culture. Record shops exist to connect music with people who love it. Flippers exist to intercept that connection and extract profit from it.

I’ll continue doing everything I can to ensure that the records leaving my shop end up with people who’ll listen to them. It’s imperfect and sometimes frustrating, but it’s the right thing to do.

And to the bloke with the eight RSD records: I hope the profit was worth knowing you took music out of the hands of people who actually cared about it. I doubt it was.