.Having received a PM from a fellow forum member today, looking for some old files I had uploaded to this forum. I looked through some old stuff of mine looking for my old data DVD's and I came across this:
This was the last ever printed edition of the classified advertising newspaper called Trade-it. Dated 30th January 2015 They were exclusively online after this. However, Trade It , not so long after were either bought by, or merged with Friday-Ad. The reason I have this last ever printed edition of Trade-it was total luck. I had finished work on a Saturday and went into an ice-cream shop (I don't eat ice-cream often) and spotted a small bundle of these on the counter. So I took one to show my parents and siblings.
Trade-it in it's heyday was the Ebay, Amazon and Gumtree all combined for us living in the South-West of England. You could buy anything you could think of from the Trade-it paper. In fact, my parents bought a 8 week old Labrador puppy from the Trade-it for me as a Christmas present. 13 years later I still got her
.The trade-it was so popular that it was for sale in supermarkets such as Asda and Tesco. It started off being printed once a week. Though later it was printed 3 times a week. From memory the Wednesday one being printed on blue paper, the Friday one on green paper and the Sunday one on pink paper.
The two sections of the paper with the most advertising sales. Would be the cars section and the video games section.
We weren't poor but money was tight as I had 3 brothers and a sister. With 7 of us in the family the weekly shop would be pretty big. So we would all help to bring the shopping in from the car to the kitchen. While doing this you would hope to see the blue, green or pink corner of the trade-it paper sticking out of one of the shopping bags. If we did, then that would mean our parents are willing to let us buy a video game or two!
Kids don't know how spoiled they are these days. Back in the day if a game came out that you really wanted. You had to drive to shop after shop to see if they had it in stock for sale. If you were after a specific older game then the chances trying to find it in a shop was pretty much 0. Here in Bristol you had 3 choices, Pink Planet AKA Games Exchange, Cash Converters or Special Reserve (Dave Perry worked for them at one stage). You would go there in hope that you could find it. Which 99% of the time you wouldn't. Then end up buying a different game.
My 3 brothers and I would look through the video games section of the Trade-it looking for the specific games we wanted. There would be quite a lot of pages. When you found a game you were looking for. You would hope that it would be close enough to buy. Then your spirits would be crushed when you would say “Swindon” with my dad replying simply “too far”.
I remember one night my dad going out to put petrol in the car. He came back with a pink coloured Trade-it under his arm. We searched it and found a game we'd had wanted for ages called Boogerman on the Sega Mega Drive for £6. We said “Dundry” and he said yep that's close enough. My father rang and the guy still had it (another crushing blow would be when the person on the other end of the phone would say it's already been sold). We got into my dads car and went and bought the game. It was about an hour from the time my dad bought the Trade-it to the time we were playing Boogerman on our Mega Drive in the living room.
These days, 4 clicks of a mouse and Boogerman will arrive on your doorstep in 2 days!
Another game we really wanted but couldn't find anywhere was Earthworm Jim 2 because the first one was one of the games we played the most. We bought it from Trade-it but I remember our parents had to drive quite far to get that one.
We ended up buying hundreds of video games amongst many other things through the Trade-it over the years it was in publication.
Though with the internet and sites like eBay, Amazon etc. Classified ad newspapers went the way of VHS rental stores.
Some of my happiest memories are that of looking through the Trade-it. May it RIP.