When I was in college, when I drove back home for holidays, etc, vie US Hwy 64 I remember passing an Army-Navy surplus store outside of Asheboro, NC, Retracing the route on Google Maps, it looks like it’s still there. They don’t even appear to have a website, or I would have linked to that instead of Google Street View.
When I was in Boy Scouts our Scoutmaster would sometimes brings MRE’s on camping trips. I think he actually got them at gun shows. But that was around 30 years ago so I have no idea if that’s still a good source for them.
Eating MRE’s was kind of fun just for the novelty of eating an MRE, but flavor wise they kind of sucked. Except for the scalloped potatoes and ham one. That one was surprisingly good.
When I was growing up, my dad had a bunch of WWII surplus things, mostly steel barrels (much smaller than 55 gal drums) and 50 cal ammo cans. Sturdy things.
How many M-16s would one have to buy to bring the price down to $4.80? You’d think every other firearm around would be M-16s, or $2.60 Colt 45s. I would have liked to have seen their warehouse.
These are the nice folks who sell this stuff for real: DLA Auction Site. You need to create an account to look around at what’s on offer or to bid on the goods. Which I did not do. I did do a little checking around and they will accept credit cards to pay for winning bids up to $25K. So you can get the stuff of your dreams!
[story time]
When I was a teen (1970s) my Dad got on subscription for the same auction system. Back then they’d mail out a 10-20 page flyer every couple of weeks with a couple-of-paragraphs blurb on each item (or lot of items usually) for sale. Usually mundane stuff but once in awhile … Surprise! In those days the auctions were performed in person and you were obligated to settle up the bill (bank check only) and haul away your winnings that very day.
DLA had a storage / disposal site somewhere out in the desert northeast of LA where we lived. One time we went out there to view the goods and watch the auction. Acres and acres of random crap piled roughly on slowly rotting, often crushed, wooden pallets sitting out there baking in the desert sun. They’d attach a flag to the pallets in today’s sale so you could find them in the vastness.
An image that sticks in my mind is a pallet of about 200 1-gallon paint cans. Originally the cans were olive drab, but the sun had fried the paint off the outside of most of them. A few were bent or open or laying on the ground next to the pallet. All were supposedly ordinary enamel (1970s, remember) house paint. But looking at the manufacturing dates stenciled on the cans, the stuff dated from the mid 1960s. Good bet it was all solidified into uselessness. IOW it was just a pallet of hazmat needing professional disposal. Yet DLA was hoping to sell it to somebody.
Dad did not renew our subscription to their auction catalogs the next year.
I have to assume the goods and storage yards are the same as ever, despite the shiny e-commerce website selling the stuff.
My son wanted to buy “desert combat boots” off of Amazon a couple of years ago. I took him to the local army/navy surplus store and it was a ton of fun. First off, they had boots that fit his small feet. And with a couple of siblings in tow, we found a couple different fun things like bandana’s that were a great deal.
It makes sense whomever upthread that stated when we were younger there was a lot of WWII, Korea, & Vietnam surplus so there was real military surplus in all of the Army-Navy stores & that’s why there aren’t as many anymore.
Why were they always Army-Navy stores; why did the other military branches get left out?
I used the Swiss camo back when I played paintball. It was perfect as I sometimes got ‘wounded’ instead of ‘killed’ when I got shot because no one could see the paintball splatter in that camo patter…
I had gunner’s gloves - an insulated gauntlet with a thumb, index finger (for shooting the WWII bomber guns) & the remaining three fingers were in a single mitten which provides more warmth than individual fingers.
I bought a British Police raincoat,for something like $13. It was kind of like this one except it was uninsulated but had a zipper down each side with extra fabric inside; it would fit in the summer & one could unzip one or both sides if one was wearing it over a heavier jacket & it would still fit.
My plan was to replace “Police” with “EMS” but I was afraid to sew the EMS patch on for fear of ruining the waterproofing & never did find good glue that would hold the different materials & not splotch the cloth EMS patch so I never used it much.
[Story] - We had a winter precipitation mix storm, some snow, some sleet, some freezing rain, maybe some rain, too. Traffic was backed up because people were both driving slow & couldn’t make it up the hills near me. Like the USPS, neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night would stop me from my appointed runs. I put on my ice shoes, running tights & the Bobbie jacket on top; it was both waterproof & very visible between the color & all of the reflectivity & I had to run in the streets as they were safer than the untreated/unshoveled sidewalks. Some guy in a 4x4 pickup rolls down his window & asked if I needed a lift down the street. I think he thought I was a cop trying to run to some call.
I bet a lot of those were opened in 1946 by returning vets. At that time USAF did not yet exist and the big land-based aviation service was a subdivision of the Army. The USMC was (and still is) a subdivision of the Navy. (Sorta kinda; not wanting to get into quibbling over bureaucratic minutiae).
Then once the term “Army/Navy” got recognized by the public for the category, it stuck. Until eventually “war surplus” or “military surplus” took over as the category name, while “Army/Navy” persisted in the naming of some individual shops.
While researching for my post upthread I looked up the last “surplus” store I’d visited when I lived near St. Louis MO. Last I’d been inside was ~2004. A little bit of real or copied military-style gear, and lots of camping equipment. Plus some guns.
They seem to be an armed insurrectionist’s wet dream. “2A Lifestyle” indeed.
Big picture / Bottom line:
I suspect the word “Tactical” has pretty well replaced “surplus” in the category of real and fake quasi-military gear for sale to the public.
In 2020 I was doing Census work and, after St Louis slowed, applied to travel to Minnesota, which seemed to call for quality, sharp looking, rain gear. Surplus shops were selling RAF Goretex jackets, sometimes with pants — but no hooded versions. I loved the RAF blue, and the cost was 1/3 of Northface, so I ordered from a UK vendor.
Minnesota did not pan out. The rain outfit looks good, but is very heavy for its level of warmth and dryness. It also has Extremely Noisy velcro above the front zipper. Without a hood, a rain hat is always required. So it hangs in my closet. Have worn it maybe twice.
Having been a boomer, there was WWII surplus around when I was growing up. At our house we had two GI sleeping bags. They had an inner itchy wool, way too hot, tight fitting (for an adult) bag and an outer rain shell that did nothing. There was also a rifle that had to have been WWII surplus.
One grandfather had two collapsible cots that were amazing to watch going from a tight little thing to a cot. Slept on those when we visited. Not remotely comfortable. Given that he enlisted in WWI, they might actually have been that vintage.
I actually have some WWII vintage, non-surplus, stuff. First my father’s uniform that somehow I got stuck with and can’t bring myself to throw out. Then two AM/SW AA6 radios he built from kits when he took an electronics class. (During the war, production of domestic radios was halted but it was okay to sell kits to make radios.)
But surplus from Vietnam or later just hasn’t been part of my world. There was a “surplus” store near us where we last lived but I never bothered to visit it.
One item I’ve seen quite a few times are old ammo boxes. A lot of people swear by them for various uses but I never had the urge to buy one.
(My understand of the “Jeeps for $50” ads is that the Jeeps were on some remote Pacific island and you had to theoretically arrange delivery. Since the advertisers didn’t actually own the Jeeps, they made their money selling brochures to suckers.)
With just about every PD having a tactical team, many with surplus military equipment that is much more in your face, & in your neighborhood than some far off military conflict I’m not surprised that the term has changed. Hell, we had a MRAP at our fire prevention expo a week ago.
I’ve got my father’s white cloth sailor cap, the classic kind with the upturned brim all around that can be folded down for more coverage. Never worn it as it’s too small for me. Dad was a fire controlman on a destroyer in WWII; did Atlantic convoys and Normandy.
Back in 1971, I bought a US M-1951 arctic parka at a genuine mil-surplus store in Boston. The liner ripped in about 1984, but I still have it. Not much of a necessity now in NC, but I wear it every so often. This is one that has real fur on the detachable hood. It is amazingly comfortable and has about 71 pockets. The zipper still works and it hasn’t lost a single button.
