Thrift stores

[JitterbugPerfume]

Over the week end I found

a Casio keyboard for $12

Books--
Jane Austin illustrated by Fritz Eichenberg $1

Hiroshima -John Hersey 1st edition $1

Animal Dreams _ Barbara Kingsolver$1

Appalacian Odyssey with a Fwd by Edward Abbey $1

and

In America by Susan Sontag $1

a 40 piece set of flatware still in the origional box for $15

I love thrift stores!

oh yes --I almost forgot

a sign that says Cats are like potato chips , you can't have just one


What treasure have you found at thrift stores?

[JitterbugPerfume]

1. no thrift store shoppers here?

you don't know what you're missing!

[latebloomer]

2. I wish we had a good one around here

Used to have a Good Will but it closed.

We have another, but on the rare occasions I've gone in there was hardly ever anything there that I wanted.

Same thing happens to me at yard sales.

I think you have to have a lot more fortitude and perseverance than I do when it comes to any kind of shopping.

[JitterbugPerfume]

8. some Goodwill stores are useless

but a good one is a treasure trove!

[Orrex]

38. My local store is useless

I recently found a 4x CD-ROM drive, still in the box, for $49.95. Their book section has six copies of The Da Vinci Code. The store abuts a Dollar Store; Goodwill sells certain items for, say, $3.95, while the Dollar Store sells the exact same item for $1.00.

I don't know who they got to do the pricing, but it was clearly someone with no grasp of market forces or reality at large.


If there were any other Goodwill store within 20 miles, I'd certainly go there intstead.

[mitchum]

3. In the past couple of years, I have found...

approximately two dozen books that I sold for a total of $250
3 guitar amps
1953 Regal guitar
Armani jacket
2 graphic equalizers
2 four channel mixers
4 pairs of never worn shoes
Moog synth

All of this cost me slightly more than $200
Like you, I also love thrift stores :)

[JitterbugPerfume]

9. Goodwill and Salvation army stores

are great for finding really good books

especially old out of print books:hi:

[mitchum]

17. Until I got a "real job" four years ago, I pretty much made my living...

by scouring thrift stores for out of print books. The majority of them were published within the past three decades.
Now, I only manage to get in about two or three hours of book grubbing a month.

[JitterbugPerfume]

20. some of those thrift store books can be valuable

I have foung lots of first editions and my sister found one autographed by Steve Allen

[Critters2]

4. I've found a lot of nice clothes at the resale shop run by the hospital auxiliary here.

Also, a nice set of luggage, three pieces, labeled $6.00 a piece, but when I went to the counter to pay, she said she'd give me the whole set for $5.00.

Probably the best thing was a Black and Decker Jar Opener. I had been wanting one of these, had it on my Amazon wish list, when I found one at a church rummage sale. It was price $2.00. The ladies admitted they didn't know what it was, so didn't know how to price it. I explained what it was, and they still asked $2.00. They're about $30.00 new. I downloaded the owner's manual from a website, and it works great!

[JitterbugPerfume]

10. my sister gave me a jar opener

and I love it!

[Lars39]

5. I found a laptop stand for $1.49 at Goodwill.

Works fine. :hi:

[JitterbugPerfume]

11. cool!

:hi:

[Tangerine LaBamba]

6. I had something like this

(not this one) on my office door for years - cost me a quarter in a Goodwill store......................

[JitterbugPerfume]

14. I love it!

:hippie:

[Dystopian]

7. Great finds!

:hi:
I get all my clothing at the Salvation Army...everything except underthings and boots....
I love the weekly 1/2 price tag day sale the best...

I needed a trench coat a few years back...saw a beautiful black London Fog (odd, as I usually don't know brands)
I knew it would be gone soon...so I walked out of there happy with the coat, but really pissed that I had to pay the full $10 for it. I still bitch about that when someone comments on it.:blush:

I've been buying my clothes there for 40 years....

peace~

[JitterbugPerfume]

15. Salvation Army Stores have good clothing!

I buy clothes there every chance I get , I just hate paying full price


$10 bucks for a London Fog? you did GOOD

[Sequoia]

12. I found a 1930 Rudyard Kipling book for $1

"The Light That Failed". I may never read it though. I just like old books.

I've been going to thrift shops for years. I found a hand-knit wool sweater for $3 from Norway with Viking decorations on it.

I found some crystal dishes for under $5 too.

[JitterbugPerfume]

18. I found 3 hand made

arts and crafts bowls for 75 cents apiece , did a Google worth search on the brand and they were worth about $60! They look great on my book case

I also found Leaves of Grass illustrated 1940 editiom and it sells for $95 on Ebay . It was still in the box. I love it and I will never sell it!

[Sequoia]

21. Doncha just love it !!!

I have a children's history book that only goes to the Industrial Age and an English book of my mom's from the late 1930s or so.

[charlie and algernon]

22. I found a copy of that 1940 Leaves of Grass on Goodwill's auction site

bought for $17. I plan on keeping it too.

[flvegan]

13. I buy blankets for the dogs there all the time.

Picked up two really nice ones for $5 the other day.

[Critters2]

16. Oh, yeah. Me, too. Haven't bought an actual dog bed in years.

The beagle's much loved Scooby blanket is from a resale shop.

[JitterbugPerfume]

19. can't beat the price!

[hunter]

23. I buy film cameras at thrift stores, and most everything else too.

I rarely find any reason to buy something new. Underwear and socks I buy new.

Lately I'm crazy about cameras. I bought a nice, clean, working SLR for $16. It was a camera I'd considered buying many years ago. If I'm patient I eventually get what I want...

Most of the other cameras in my collection cost $1.00 or less. My favorites are the semi-disposable plastic cameras, the kind that used to cost less than $10 new ten or twenty years ago when plastic lens technology was still primitive. (The plastic lenses in brand name modern disposables are surprisingly good.)

I sometimes find film at thrift stores too, exposed and unexposed. A few days ago I found an unopened box of Kodak Ultramax, four rolls of film, for a dollar. When I'm brave I'll also get the exposed film I find developed, hoping the photos are not something the nice women at Costco will call the police about. But mostly those found pictures are pretty boring, the kind that people didn't even bother developing when they bought their shiny new digital cameras.

Cheap plastic camera wonderfulness:



Can your fancy digital camera do that?

[JitterbugPerfume]

26. Great picture!

[5thGenDemocrat]

24. Tee Shirts

I've been collecting tee shirts ever since I was in the Army in 1974. I can't give you an exact number, but I'd guess it's somewhere north of 1500 (and I've probably lost/destroyed/had swiped twice that many over the years).
Thrift stores are great because if you're into high school and college shirts (especially football camp shirts), they are your best source and nearly every town of any real size has one or a dozen.
Army/Navy stores are great, too. I have a Soviet ammo crate here, complete with Cyrillic lettering, which I bought in Tulsa, OK for $30 and which holds a couple hundred of said shirts.
John
Living in Saginaw, MI, it's easy to find Michigan or Michigan State shirts. But you can't go out to JC Penney and pick up a tee from Muskingum College or Drake or the University of Mississippi. A little Googling and a couple road trips a year and it's easy to be sartorically splendid. Or at least to always have a clean shirt handy.

[mitchum]

37. I like to look for thrift store Tee Shirts from organizations that I obviously don't belong to...

cheerleading squads
police academies
religious groups
etc
:)

[RebelOne]

25. I have about 3 thrift stores near my house.

Haven't gone to them much, but I think I'll check them out again. I go to Big Lots quite often, which is sort of like a thrift store.

[schmuls]

27. I love 'em

There are several in my city, and they are a regular outing for me. My friend found the cutest little things for her new apartment. I found two gorgeous wedding dresses for $10.00 each. I found my local Goodwill store a cheap outing and a great source of entertainment. The customers often talk to each other about their great finds!

[Sanity Claws]

28. Coffee mugs

I manage to break them easily so I've started buying cheap mugs at Thrift Stores for 99 cents each.
One may end up being worth something, if I don't break it first. It's a Lehman Brothers mug.

[grace0418]

29. A funny story...

We are redoing our whole house right now. Our design tastes and our budget generally dictate that we do a lot of shopping at Ikea. The nice part about a lot of Ikea items is that they are quite customizable if you're handy and creative. So we've been able to do that a bit. Still, I didn't want our place to look like Ikea threw up in it, so we've been prowling thrift shops to find some other items.

We were dropping stuff off at the Brown Elephant near our house and my husband spotted some crazy orange plastic chairs. They needed some tlc but were really cool and only seven bucks. So we bought them, got them home and took them outside to clean them.

That's when we turned them over and saw the Ikea logo on the bottom.

:)

I did once find a twenty dollar bill in the pocket of skirt at a thrift store. The $20 more than covered my purchases that day. Yay!

[Gormy Cuss]

30. I don't find treasures, but I find a lot of good clothes cheap.

Jeans, tops, sweaters and jackets for the most part. I also do well with finding fabric, yarn, and craft stuff, and sewing notions. I like buying unfinished needlework kits -- much cheaper than new even if I just raid them for the thread/yarn.

[charlie and algernon]

31. Now I want to go check out the local stores here

I've been lucky finding rare books on goodwill's auction site, not so much going into the store itself. But after reading these posts, I wanna try again.

[Kali]

32. best was long term for me

every beginning of the school year, that is where I took the kids. And it stuck! The boys will still overspend on shoes but none of them need to buy "new" - they know they can get 5 times as much new-to-them clothing for the money. Our only problem is we live so far away so we can't do that important regular swing-through to see what's new.

My best find was probably a nice two seat wooden framed sofa/loveseat piece of furniture for $5. Or maybe the unused, brand spanking new kerosene stove/oven from the 40's. It wasn't a bargain ($200) but it is WAY cool.

[LeftyMom]

33. Pretty much everything I own.

I hate buying things new- it's wasteful and expensive and half the time they're made poorly and fall apart.

Best thrift store finds?

-$800 hospital breast pump, the kind designed to be rented out, for $4 (I wasn't nursing anymore, but I took it home, cleaned it up and gave it to a new Mom who needed one.)
-My favorite dress- $4 with tags still on
-My bike, $18, just needed cleaned up and new tires and tubes
-LK's play kitchen $8, they sell new for at least ten times that
-Innumerable books for $1 or less

[krispos42]

Work pants

I wear Docker-style khakis to my job. I work in a factory, lots of bending, sharp metal, grease, etc. I can pick up khaki pants for two or three dollars a pair, and they're in very good shape. Unlike jeans, khakis go out of style when they start getting worn out. And they have deeper pockets than jeans do.


I got a big bag full of Legos (the toddle-sized ones... Duplex?) for $2.75. That was a sweet deal!

[peacefreak]

34. One of my favorite things to do

Among my favorites:
a print by Woody Crumbo--Starlight
rabbit wine opener (just makes me want to drink more wine because it's so fun to use)
Overland Equipment bag
all those for no more than $5. each.

I just bought a stack of Tess Gerritsen's books for .20 each
And I always check the DVD's & CD's

I used to get a lot of my daughter's clothes there when she was a kid. Nice Oshkosh overalls & Polly Flinder dresses. The kid was covered.

I've noticed more cars at Goodwill than at Target these days. Sign of the times.

[Roon]

35. clothes, pots and pans.....

and my ex loved to pick up bread machines looking for the best one to do the job. My Mother even shops at the thrift store now. (If you knew my freeper Mother, you would be shocked!)

[Bertha Venation]

36. "Cats are like potato chips , you can't have just one"

Yes, I know. :)

[Forkboy]

39. I have read Hiroshima.

:(

The best thing I've gotten at a thrift store was a exact replacement (minus some painted stuff on it that I had done) of my stolen leather jacket. I paid $180 for the original one, but only $40 for the replacement, so I was thrilled. :)