The thrift shops are open! Let's buy stuff!
8Our local Goodwill stores opened, this week? Last week? I don’t know. Time still has little meaning. [It was last week.] Went to two yesterday. At the first one, I bought an opened Camel Lights-branded box of matchbooks from 1992. It was $1.99, which seems like a decent price for approximately 45 new matchbooks, let alone ones branded Camel Cash. At the second, I bought 2 balls of yarn apparently from the same donation I bought about 8 of earlier in the year (half price, even!), 2 balls of Elements hemp jewelry cord, 4 packs of rick rack (also half price!) and a mostly complete Shakespearean insult magnetic poetry-esque kit for a total cost of $6.40. It felt good to be doing something normal-ish, even in a mask.
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Does it count that I dropped some stuff off at the thrift shop donation door today? First day they were open to do that (and they are only open 1 day a week for 4 hours instead of 4 days a week all day).
@Kidsandliz YES! I should have spent the last 2-3 months getting donations ready and did not. I applaud your initiative.
I’ve been saving my shipping boxes to donate to my fave thrift store. Tomorrow I’ll drop them off and indulge. (Note: tear the shipping labels off.) They use them as bins to store stuff in their warehouse, and to sort donations into.
@OldCatLady woah. I’ll keep that in mind. I just recycle my shipping boxes. But if they can use them I’ll try that too.
I found the easiest way to remove the shipping labels is with a heat gun (or a hair dryer in a pinch).
@Bandrik @OldCatLady I usually take a knife and slice lightly around the entire label. Peel up a corner with the knife and it rips off the top thin layer of cardboard with the label. Easy peasy.
@OldCatLady @RiotDemon Ooooh good tip! Thanks for that!
I remember finding a Camel Cash certificate when I was 5 years old. It just blew into the yard. Of course I kept it, because it looked valuable and had this cool camel dude on it. Had no idea it was for cigarettes haha
@Bandrik But the cool camel dude was meant to indoctrinate you into smoking with his fun cartoon persona! And also represent a penis somehow! What a failure of advertising.
I’m jealous! We miss thrift stores, flea markets and yard sales but this is still a stay at home zone.
Our Goodwill does have drop off bins now though.
@callow I thought Michigan was the last stay at home zone.
I boughtta Eddie Bauer ceramic desktop coffee mug for a buck yesterday. And a rusty mattock with a hoe handle for 15.
@cranky1950 Rusty Mattock sounds like a B-movie action star of the '50’s. Second lead in movies now shown solely on Svengoolie. I will not address the career of Hoe Handle.
Now I need to go thrift shopping!!!
Rick rack or
/giphy rick roll
I send a bunch of junk to Goodwill several times a year…
… I don’t want any new junk myself. (Other than what Meh sends me)
I need to go donate some meh stuff!
@ELUNO [sigh] Don’t we all!
I just got rid of so much shit, one place I need to stay clear of is the thrift store. I still have two more rooms to go through.
@Star2236 What’s your point?
@OldCatLady @Star2236
My point is a skull feature that’s on the top of my head
/giphy Coneheads
@OldCatLady
My point is as much as I love the cool things I find in the thrift shop, I don’t need to bring any more junk into my place.
I actually haven’t been paying any attention on whether thrift stores have reopened here in SoCal or not. I stopped going since the end of February.
I still haven’t determined whether buying two dozen catshirtswoot locally was smart or stupid, though.
/8ball
Ask again later
@narfcake Well if you then don’t have to do laundry for the rest of your life due to how many shirts you own… might be smart (speaking as someone who has done about 180 commercial loads so far in the last 2 weeks for a no kill shelter who then wished she had more clothes so as not to have to do her own laundry last night).
Went to four Goodwills yesterday because my mom had a birthday discount (as do I, which we’ll use later in the month). I bought a new, still sealed in the box Mural Graphique, which is basically a large, plastic ruler/compass with a paint brush attachment to make ultra-70’s supergraphics. Somebody paid $14.95 for this at Montgomery Ward around 1978, which is apparently equivalent to $61.86 in today’s money. And they never even used it. Sad.
/image supergraphics
/image supergraphics wall mural
@mossygreen so what did you paint with it?
@RiotDemon Nothing… yet.
@mossygreen looks fun.
My dad texted me today and asked for recommendations on things he could try to cook sous vide. As I got more of the story, it turns out that today he picked up a Sous Vide Supreme water oven that looked brand new for $5.55 at a thrift store. (That’s a $430 appliance.)
@djslack That’s the dream, like when I bought a retail $299 bottle of perfume for $2.99 last year.
@djslack @mossygreen Our thrift shops are pretty good at googling prices. Nice score!
@djslack @mossygreen A couple years ago the charity shop across from my office sold a set of 6 Japanese watercolor paintings for $60. The buyer had them appraised and discovered they are Meiji era works by a recognized artist. They are valued at thousands of dollars. Each.
The buyer is a well known local. Whether from a philanthropic nature, or a fear of community gossip and becoming an outcast, the buyer made a donation to the charity for $5,000. I guess the motivation for the buyer’s action isn’t as important as the good deed, is it. Good for them, good for the charity.
@djslack
Our salvo stores google prices too. Almost takes the fun out of it anymore. A fricking coffee mug can be like $5, it’s absolutely ridiculous. There’s one I go to, can’t remember the name of it but there really reasonable still.
@djslack @mossygreen @ruouttaurmind
Very nice score for the buyer. I wouldn’t have had the $5000 to donate to the charity but I’m poor. Nicest thing I’ve ever scored is a good humidifier lol
@Star2236 This is a pretty affluent community. It’s only us worker bees who lack means. The residents are generally quite well off. The buyer is a very well known person in the community and the $5k donation most definitely did not affect their budget.
@djslack @sammydog01 I’m super-irritated by shopgoodwill.com because it takes stuff out of the stores and raises prices. And while I see things I might otherwise not have access to, shipping and handling adds $10-20 to the cost. I guess it’s good for Goodwill. And I only look at Monster High stuff, which is often heavier/bulkier, so the rest of the site could be OK. But it’s still annoying.
We drop off a few boxes and bags of stuff every couple of months as we slowly purge stuff in preparation for retirement and moving. I stopped in the nearby Goodwill after dropping off and sitting right in front of the generic mug shelf was a 1980’s Walgreens mug from a Walgreens I used to go to in Las Vegas; it was near my work. You could tell it was older by the fact that it still had 7 digit phone numbers, from before you had to dial the area code for all calls. …
I’ve never really found anything exceptional at this location… just some small fun finds and a couple of books.
@duodec I’m assuming I still have a general idea of where you live and know the Goodwill in question. If so, the best thing I ever got there was the base of a Ka-bala fortune-telling game in the box. I would have bought the empty box. It wasn’t priced, so we got a quote from one employee, and then another employee charged us 99¢. It was great.
/image kabala fortune telling game
If it’s the other Goodwill, then I can’t remember the best thing I ever got there, but it was probably pretty good. Oh, it might have been a new What’s Her Face doll deluxe set w/What’s Her Pet and fake eyelashes.