Selling My Stuff

With only weeks to go until my contract expires, I have decided to sell many of my items.
I have been brutal with what needs to go because I want a light suitcase to carry when I leave Japan. I snapped open a black plastic bag and went about depleting my room of things I hoped to get money from. Among these items were CDs, clothes, and my sofa.
I went to a nearby second hand music and film, whilst carrying a bag containing over 100 CDs. I said hello to the staff and dumped all my items on the counter and said, "I sell, you buy?"
In order to make eye contact with me, they had to stand on tip-toes above the piles of CDs before telling me they would need to check the quality of the CDs before deciding which ones to buy.
I said OK, and wandered around the store whilst they gave my items a severe investigation.
Two hours later, they said they wanted to buy all of it. The store assistant gave me an invoice as to how much they would pay for my stuff: 20,000 yen. This wasn't much but I signed the invoice regardless and pocketed my cash.
The next item I wanted to sell were some of my clothes. Most of the clothes were clunky winter wear which would be heavy inside my travel bag.
I went to a second hand clothes store and dumped my clothes on the counter. The staff told me to wait an hour whilst they checked the quality of the clothes.
One hour later I walked back inside the store with a doughnut that cost me 120 yen. The shop worker called me over to give their assessment. It wasn't as glowing as the music store. It was, instead, a denouncement. The woman behind the counter shook her head and said that most of the clothes were unsuitable for selling. At first I thought she was damning my fashion taste but it turned out that the shop didn’t buy winter clothes in the height of summer. Which makes sense, but I tried to find a loophole round this by offering to cut my jeans in half to create shorts, and chop-up my jumpers to make a woolly vest. The shop worker wasn't having any of it and shook her head. She offered some consolation because she pointed to a big pile of my clothes they wanted to buy.
I asked her how much they would offer. She punched some buttons on her calculator and then flipped it round so I could see the ridiculous price: 100 yen.
"You’re telling me this bloody doughnut is more expensive than a pile of my clothes?!" I asked animatedly.
She didn't understand, and shrugged her shoulders. I had no other choice but to accept this unethical offer and walk out the store 100 yen richer. To cover the fact that I had just wasted one hour of my life, I tried to repeat the soothing mantra of: Every little helps. Unfortunately a pragmatic devil mantra finished off the sentence with but 100 yen gets you fucking nowhere.
The next thing to sell was my two seater sofa. I bought it for 5,000 yen and thought I could recoup half of that price. I had the arduous task of picking up this heavy load and walking from the 4th floor of my apartment to the car park below. Carrying it down the stairs was an absolute nightmare, and I was panting and salivating like an uncouth fiend. Half way through this excruciating ordeal, I lost my grip on the sofa, and it rattled down the winding steps like a bob-sleigh on a slalom. I was relieved no had been walking up in the opposite direction because they would have been flattened.
As I reached the bottom I saw the yellow sofa upturned in a muddy puddle. I spent at least half an hour cleaning the mud-caked sofa until it was suitable for selling. Once this was achieved, I needed to cram the sofa into my little car. It was like fitting an elephant inside a pencil case.
In the end I managed to squeeze it in by putting down the back seats and sliding the sofa in from the opened boot, whilst pushing the front seats up to the windscreen. As I buckled up, I noticed my nose was touching the windscreen and my legs were bent in some strange shape. It looked like I was a 20-foot giant trying to ride a toy tricycle. In this ridiculous position, I drove to the local second hand furniture store.
Thankfully the friendly staff carried this yellow leviathan into the store whilst I tried to reorganize my body to its proper shape. Behind the counter three staff members were quietly conferring about the value of the sofa. Five minutes later they came back with an invoice that read 500 yen.
I stared at them with murderous intent.
500 yen is under £5. I couldn't put a value on my morning tribulations but I would guess, for sheer effort, I should get at least half the price I paid for the sofa.
But the shop workers weren't budging on their offer.
I snatched the 500 yen coin out of one of the workers hand and walked out the store whilst declaring war on all the sofas in the world, before blowing the money on a bag of doughnuts.