3 or 4 years back, when my daughter was getting ready to move to an apartment, I hit a Goodwill.
This location would put colored price stickers on things to help them tell how long they’d been there, and when they’d been there for a month or two, they went on sale for half off.
Nearly everything she needed was in the half-off category (and because I’d registered at the store on a previous shopping trip, I got another 25% off). So I basically equipped her kitchen for 1/4 of the thrift store price.
Not EVERYTHING - their selection of pots and pans was nearly nil - but she got a lifetime supply of plates and drinkware, and quite a few other items.
I found a men’s wool coat, long down to my knees, linden green lined in orange plaid, giant lapels and leather covered button s, deep pockets. Frost King is the brand. I had a seamstress modify the lapels. So funky!
I’m kinda like that too. Hate shopping. I don’t need much. I order all my clothes online. I do have to go to Lowes for home stuff. The random door nob or 2x4. And I have to go to the grocery store. I have a UPS box in town. I don’t make UPS come to my house. And in winter, forgetaboutit.
I have a very good friend that can’t pass by a yard/garage whatever sale. Surprisingly, her house is not cluttered and full of junk. It’s a bit eclectic though. So is she. She’ll wear a heavy wool cape in winter. Was driving with her once and ‘Garage Sale!’ was shouted out in the car. I did grab a Men at Work album.
Speaking of eclectic I’d love to replace one of the rain downspouts with a real gargoyle who wouldn’t? The ones I’ve found are ornamental. One a winged demon named Carl and another is a humanlike head about the size of a large softball. Where does one display a ballgagged grotesque, on the patio of course!
Well, if you consider Temu a thrift shop, then I scored big time just last week.
I got pair of slippers (wearable outdoors) and 2 “bowling” shirts (I don’t bowl, that’s just what they’re called): one with a large martini on the front, the other is black with a big pink flamingo on the front! Both shirts are very shiny—so are the slippers (that’s a sign of quality). Got them all for under $20!
My daughters used to be embarrassed by the clothes I wore when I was out with them—but they won’t be anymore!
Very much against my advice the same thrift store where I more recently worked, where I got the knee scooter, the boots, and the Minolta 16 II camera (and a few other things that I may go on to post in here), priced this Stetson at $4.99. I told them, its a genuine Stetson, and Stetsons aren’t cheap.
But they insisted on pricing it at that point, so I bought it. With my discount, it came to $3.49.
For no rational reason, I’ve long had some desire to own a genuine Stetson, but not enough that I would ever pay for one anything close to what one is actually worth. But at $4.99, minus the 30% discount I got for working there, I wasn’t going to pass it up.
This is Stetson’s Open Road Straw hat. At the time, Stetson was listing it on their own web site for $135. I see, just now, that they’ve since raised the price to $155.
I really didn’t rationally think I needed it, but from the time it first appeared in that same thrift store even if it was tucked away, out of sight, I could hear it calling me. A genuine vintage Milwaukee Sawzall, which I initially assumed to be roughly 1970s vintage. I already had a much more modern, cordless, DeWalt reciprocating saw, so I really didn’t need this one as well. But eventually, I proved unable to resist it. Ten dollars, it got priced at, which, with my discount, became seven dollars.
It turns out, on some communication with Milwaukee’s customer support, I learned that this model was made over a long period, beginning in the early 1970s, and continuing into the early 2000s. Based on the serial number, this one was apparently made in 1989. So not nearly as old as I had assumed.
It’s in great condition, but has very obviously seen a lot of work. I’d love to know what great things it has been used to build. This is a professional-grade construction worker tool; and it has been used as such since it came into my possession. It turns out to have some advantages over my much more modern DeWalt saw. My DeWalt is considerably more powerful, and can cut faster, but it’s a brute force tool, as I tend to assume all saws of this type to be.
This one operates with a smoothness and precision of which I find it difficult to see this sort of saw as being capable. I’ve used this saw to cut ⅜" and ½" allthread, and was able, every time, to cut it cleanly enough not to need to clean up the threads or the cut end. You just don’t expect to be able to do that with a reciprocating saw. One of my colleagues, using a band saw, which is considered more suitable for that task, was not able to cut as cleanly as I was with this saw.
And again, from that same thrift store. This was at a time when my time at that store was nearing an end, and I was looking forward to returning to real work, after recovering from my broken leg. I was sorting through a bin of donated clothing, and came across this pair of boots, of curious design. I tried them on, and found that they fit me perfectly. These are Haix Airpower XR1 boots. Well beyond normal construction worker boots, these are actually meant for firemen and paramedics and other first-responder types. I showed them to a manager, told them what they were, an what they were worth. he asked me if I wanted them and I indicated that I did, so he told a pricer to print out a ten-dollar shoe tag for them for me. Ten dollars (seven with my discount for working there), for what was almost a four-hundred dollar pair of boots.
It seems almost like there was a supernatural intelligence there, that decided that when I returned to construction work, that I should do so with the very best possible pair of boots, and somehow arranged for such a pair, in exactly my size, to find their way to me.
This was from a different thrift store, at a time when @Seanette and I were both working there. This is the same store where I got the Minolta 110 Zoom SLR. I wasn’t entirely sure what it actually was, but I recognized it as “electrician tools” relevant to the profession into which I was trying, at the time, to get. Priced at a dollar. @Seanette was just getting off shift at the time, an I still had a few hours to go before the end of my shift, so I handed this off to her to buy on her way out. With the 20% discount we got for working there, a dollar became 80¢.
The “Fox Jr.” injects a signal into a wire or cable which you can then trace with the “Hound Jr.”. It turns out to work exceptionally well on MC cable, and has been used on numerous occasions to sort out which cable is which where either they were run without properly labeling them, or where the labels got lost. (Since you cannot easily write directly on MC cable, it is common practice to use pieces of tape to label them, but those labels sometimes tear off as the cable is being pulled. (In some other context, perhaps I’ll boast of a means that I’ve invented to label MC cables, in a way that is not nearly so vulnerable to being damaged.))
At the time, I looked it up on Amazon, and saw that it was going for about forty dollars. Currently, going for $52.24.
Back to the other thrift store, of which I’ve mostly spoken, at some point we had a bunch of very old hand saws come through. Three of them are pictured here, two very, very old saws, and one not nearly so old. I eventually wound up buying two of them, when, after sitting on the shelf too long, the price had dropped to 99¢ each, which was the last step before they would be thrown away unsold. I can’t say for sure whether either of the two that I bought were the two older ones in this picture.
It wasn’t so much that I wanted the saws, as that I hated the thought of such antiques merely being thrown out as trash; though that was probably the fate of most of them.
They were branded “Warranted Superior”, which I have learned was a generic brand that was used by many companies back in that period. The idea was that if a company had a reputation for making very high-quality high-priced goods, but wanted to sell a cheaper product without tainting its own prestigious brand name by association therewith, they might brand the product as “Warranted Superior” instead of using their own brand name. These saws did, however, have the logo of their true manufacturer, which was a company named Disston; and which, in fact, was once widely regarded as one of the highest-quality manufacturers of hand saws of this type. The version of the logo that appeared on these saws is a version that was only used in the 1840 and 1850s. In the 1860s, they changed the logo somewhat, and in 1871, they changed it again to something completely different.
So, I can reliably date these saws the 1840s or 1850s.
The bottommost one in this picture is a much, much more modern example, probably from the 1950s or 1960s. I did not buy that one nor any like it. By that point in time, the Disston family had sold the brand to some much bigger company, that made much lower-quality saws under that brand than those with which the brand had previously been associated.
Straw hats are great! Do you know how to reblock it to fit your head? There are a lot of videos explaining how to do it in your sink, or I can tell you how I do it.