# Two prices on one record means it did not sell

> A used record's overlapping shop stickers are a complete commercial history, and the older price underneath a marked-down one tells you it sat on the rack.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/shop-price-sticker

Fluorescent orange, `£4.50` in biro. A small printed grading tag, `EX/VG+`. A `FILED UNDER` label
with *Neo-Psychedelic Fog* written in biro underneath it. A `REDUCED` starburst. Underneath all of
it, half-covered, an older sticker still reads `£8.99`.

Nobody had to write two prices on a record. The fact that somebody did tells you the whole story.

## What does a stack of shop stickers actually record?

Time. Each sticker was applied at a different point and none of them were ever removed.

A shop marking down a record it hasn't sold doesn't peel off the old price — it's faster to slap a
`REDUCED` label over the top and write a new one. The result is a small, accidental timeline stuck
to the shrink wrap: first price, then a markdown, layered in the order they happened, still legible
underneath each other. Nobody designed that arrangement. It's a receipt for how long something sat
on a rack.

## Why does the £8.99 underneath matter more than the £4.50 on top?

Because together they're proof, and alone neither one is.

A single price sticker just tells you what something costs. Two prices, one clearly older and one
clearly newer, tell you it didn't sell at the first number — which is a small piece of information
about taste, timing, and how a shop actually behaves, and none of it was intentional. The record
is more interesting for having failed to move once.

## Why did somebody write a genre by hand instead of using a printed category?

Because the shop's existing categories didn't fit, and the person filing it knew that.

`FILED UNDER` with a genre in biro is the funniest object in a record shop, and it happens because
record shops run out of categories long before they run out of records. Somebody holding a copy
that's not quite psych, not quite folk, not quite anything already printed on a divider card,
invents a name for it on the spot, in their own handwriting, and that name becomes the record's
official filing for as long as it sits in that box.

### Why the handwriting is the whole joke

The genre could be accurate, wrong, or a private joke between the staff — and once it's in biro on
a sticker, a shopper reads it as if it were a real category, because it's printed in the same spot
where a real one would go.

## Is a grading tag a fact or an opinion?

An opinion, written in a format that borrows the authority of a fact.

`EX/VG+` looks like a measurement — a code, printed small and precise — but record grading is a
judgement made by whoever's behind the counter that day, on a scale with no enforcement and mild
disagreement between shops about what counts as excellent versus very good plus. It's an honest
opinion dressed as a spec sheet, which is exactly what makes it worth printing. The counter side of
this same argument —
[what grading looks like from inside the shop](/stories/record-shop-staff-shirts) —
covers the staff's version of the same judgement call.

## Do I need to reproduce a real shop's stickers?

Invent the shop, and keep the generic layer.

A real shop's name, logo and house colours belong to that shop, including ones that have closed —
a defunct name can still be somebody's to protect, and an independent shop that's gone is often a
name locals still feel strongly about. The generic pieces — a fluorescent price sticker, a grading
code, a hand-filed genre label, a `REDUCED` starburst — are industry-wide conventions rather than
any one shop's design. Invent the shop name and the rest of the object is entirely yours to draw.

## Does this layering happen anywhere other than a record shop?

Anywhere secondhand goods get marked down more than once.

A book with a pencilled price crossed out and rewritten. A charity shop tag over another tag. A
market stall sticker on top of a faded one. The mechanism is the same everywhere: an item didn't
move, somebody marked it down rather than remove the evidence, and the layers became a small
accidental history of the object's time unsold.

## Does it print well?

Yes — it's a cluster of small flat stickers, which is close to the easiest kind of print to
reproduce well.

Each sticker is a hard-edged shape in one or two colours, so the whole cluster gives the artwork its
own irregular outline and needs no panel around it —
[the same reason hard edges survive fabric](/stories/bold-shapes-survive-fabric) generally.
The biro handwriting is the one element to keep loose rather than vectorised too cleanly; overly
tidy handwriting reads as fake in a way a slightly uneven line doesn't. Cream, washed black and
oatmeal all suit the fluorescent orange as the loudest of two or three inks.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the sleeve at [JustOG](/) — the shop name, the prices, and what genre you'd file it under.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order
and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Somebody wrote a genre that doesn't exist anywhere else, and it was exactly right.