Thrift Store Wonderland on a Wednesday

I've been a little lazy lately, relying too much on garage sales and house calls for the bulk of my inventory. You get quality stuff from yard sales, but they only occur once a week, and since I'll be out of town this Saturday, I had to fill out the corners by visiting some thrift stores this afternoon.

Oh, I know what some of you are thinking: thrift stores! How fun! And it was, once. When I first started scouting I got the bulk of my "merchandise" from thrift stores, paying 25-40 cents per paperback and then unloading them directly to area bookstores for 1-2 dollars each. But in order to make a living or at least supplement one doing this, I had to spend four or five hours a week in the same corners of the same stores with the same staff in white lab coats filling the shelves and the same familiar pickers looking over my shoulder, taking books from under me or hoarding cartloads of mass market paperbacks while I scanned for more unique titles, often leaving empty-handed.

When you're scouting at garage sales, one or two good hits and you could be in it for hundreds, even thousands of dollars of merchandise for pennies on the dollar. At thrift stores, you'll be lucky to find ten books or CDs worth more than five bucks on Amazon. But then again, you could always walk away with some odd-looking book or CD with no barcode that every other picker has passed up and end up selling it the same night online for 80 bucks.

Which is why, no matter how highfalutin, no matter the quality of my other sources... I'll always return to that old standby: the thrift store.





Once you've been doing this for a while you get into a routine. Whether you're on foot, go by bike or by car, you make certain rounds with your favorite thrift stores. Most pickers are notoriously unforthcoming about their sources, meaning they'll never actually reveal their route, but they'll definitely admit to having one, and having favorite stores within it. There are stores we all frequent, big chain thrift stores like Unique Thrift or the Village Discount Outlet, but then there are those that are hidden in church basements, back corners of libraries and in odd six-corner storefronts with no signs and bars on the windows. I've found fifty dollar books in those quite regularly, and you'll have to ship me to a U.S. protectorate and poke me with electric prods to get me to name their hours and locations.

But today I started with the Salvation Army on Clark and Bryn Mawr. I don't feel bad giving away this source as it will be closing in three days, I learned. That's bad news. While I've never exactly walked out of the Clark/Mawr 'Army with a handful of saleable merchandise, I find at least something interesting each time I go in, like this flashback of a CD single:



And only 75 cents! You can now visit the item here.

See? I told you. I'm going to miss that little store.

Next I took a short walk down Clark Street to another favorite thrift haunt of mine, the Andersonville Brown Elephant. Some people complain that the B.E. is overpriced, but their selection is enormous and I never walk out of there with fewer than five books, unless I spot a competing book scout scanning the shelves, which I did today.


But Darryl isn't exactly competition. He used to sell books weekly to the used bookstore where I worked, so whenever I see him I'll say hello. The great thing about Darryl is that if he arrives and you're already busy scanning the shelves, he'll say hello, then scamper off to wherever his next destination is (I told you, everyone's secretive). But if I get there after he's gone though a few shelves, I'll leave him to his thing and won't jump in. He's the only other scout I mutually respect, I think.

Luckily this afternoon I didn't run into any more scouts, at least none that looked like scouts, but there was a guy at this particular thrift store which shall go unnamed:



who was taking a particular interest in my scouting tool. Oh well, let him look.

I know there are some pickers and book scouts out there who loathe those of us who use scouting devices in full view of thrift store employees and other patrons. But I don't care. I know a lot of the young folks who work at the not-for-profit thrift stores I frequent, and they don't give a rat's ass that someone is coming in looking up book prices on Amazon. Neither they nor anyone else at the store is going to raise prices because people are selling them elsewhere, because any smart thrift store knows resellers are a good percentage of their customers. So scout public and scout proud, I say. We all have to make a living. Or supplement one.




On to another standby, where I run into my first annoying customer of the day. A woman at the counter is arguing about the price of dishware to the poor employee who has no control over it. After going through each individual dish in a cart full of kitchen appliances and Tupperware, asking the cashier why the price is so high and then dramatically announcing that she will not purchase the dish and instead find a similar one at the dollar store, this woman purchases a 90 cent lapel pin in the shape of a tiger, then leaves, allowing me to finally make my own 90 cent purchase, a CD which I will now hawk on Amazon for a slightly higher price.




Then on to the most comprehensive, organized and reasonably priced thrift store of them all: Unique. Unfortunately this particular Unique (there are about 10 in the Chicago area) doesn't have the best book selection, but they have a great selection of clothes. I try not to get distracted looking at skirts, but as I make my way up to the counter with Doug Hannon's Big Bass Magic, two young girls pass me in the skirt aisle, snake my position in line, and then proceed to annoy me with their unseasoned thrifting skills. To begin with, the first girl wanted to pay with a credit card, when Unique was, is, and forever will be cash only. The second girl continued to offend by not removing the hangers from the t-shirts she was purchasing before approaching the counter.



Needless to say I wasn't having the best day, what with my bass fishing book and exploitive 4-year-old early-90's French popstar CD, so I decided to make one last stop.



I started with CDs since, now with my special scouting software aiding my keen eye and curiosity I can check going values for music as well as books. However, the only CD at the counter that really caught my eye was one that didn't have a barcode and was therefore un-look-upable. So I relied on my old fall back software: mommy.

So I had mom look the CD up on Amazon while I had her on the phone, and come to find out it was unlisted. But there were several others by the same artist, so I decided I would buy it and sell it on eBay. Thanks, mom!

After scouring the bookshelves in back for a few minutes I found two best sellers with Amazon sales ranks under 10,000 (which means they'll sell in a few days if priced to move -- if a sales rank is under 5,000 the book will usually sell in a matter of hours), and then as I was about to leave I spotted these totally old school New Kids on the Block poster books with this Tiffany concert ticket stub inside -- the opening act? NKOTB!!!

So I know they're not really worth that much, since anyone who's buying them is going to be buying them for ironic nostalgic reasons, but for some reason I get really excited when I find intact, near mind NKOTB memorabilia in thrift stores. One time I found two handmade NKOTB knit sweaters in a St. Vincent DePaul thrift shop in Ironwood Michigan. I finally sold them on eBay for about 5 bucks each, but personally, I thought they were worth more, even ironically.

Ah, but that's the way it goes in thrift land, I guess.