This year’s WILL Vintage Vinyl Sale will take place in Lincoln Square Village (mall) in downtown Urbana this Saturday, May 16. The sale offers discount prices on used records, DVDs, CDs, and working stereo equipment (CD players, turntables, speakers, etc.). All items are donated and additional donations are still being accepted at the sale site between nine and four until Thursday.
An early-bird entrance fee of $5 will be charged from 8 to 11 a.m. this Saturday, with no charge for entrance from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. After the staff reorganizes the remaining inventory, admission remains free from 4 to 6 p.m., during which time all remaining items will be discounted 50 percent.
The record selection is all of the map, from country to children’s albums, with plenty of rock, R&B, classical, and popular music mixed in. The overwhelming majority of vinyl records sell for $1, with CDs priced at $2 and DVDs at $3.
All proceeds will go towards WILL’s Illinois Radio Reader program, an organization dedicated to “bringing news, entertainment, and information to the visually impaired.”
Vintage Vinyl has been run as a WILL fundraiser for the past 20 years. For the last three years, it has been put on by and for the Illinois Radio Reader program, specifically. Last year, the sale took in around $18,000. Illinois Radio Reader director Deane Geiken, who runs Vintage Vinyl, concedes that the event “is a little more than a bake sale,” but that the money raised is still only “a drop in the bucket” in terms of the financial needs of his organization. Geiken reports that the greatest challenge in running the sale is sorting the enormous number of records to be sold, but that the rewards in terms of community involvement and awareness make it worth the effort. He and his volunteers have been laboring since March 13, when the donations began coming in. Planning for the event began back in September of last year.