My GF worked for a thrift shop, and when I picked her up after work she was admiring a 2 foot statue of Venus that had just been donated. So I bought it for her. That evening she was cleaning it up and noticed the wooden box at the foot of the figurine was hinged, but locked. I opened it with a bent paper clip and inside was a bag containing - a butt plug and anal beads. Then we figured out that if you twisted the head, it pulled a dildo out of the body.
You gotta admire the creativity and craftsmanship
Whomever draws the dildo from the statue shall be crowned king or queen of degeneracy.
Breville toaster oven, in perfect shape, for $25. That’s around $300 off.
Rang up at about $17 due to a sale.
My best haul was a Janome sewing machine which retailed around $1800 for $30. I think someone had priced it for a friend or themselves because it was on a bottom shelf behind other items despite being on the shelf for under an hour. I went back 2 days later and got the extension table for another $8.
I found a 40-inch 1080p TV for only 20 bucks at the thrift store, I've been using it for a year now and it's great!
Breville is such a good brand. Not very well known in the USA since they're an Australian brand. Kinda expensive, but very high quality.
Not so much a weird thing, but more a weird price.
My local thrift store are known to have high prices. Not because they sell high-quality stuff, the prices are just high. The most insane thing there is what's clearly a jar that used to hold pickled beets. It's clean, though, I'll give them that. Pickled beets are cheap and available in all groceries here. The thrift store chose to price this, empty, jar at 150% the price of a new jar including pickles!
We live in the same place. Pickled beets and overly expensive thrift stores.
Front for money laundering?
Oh also I got an oxygen concentrator from the wholesale Goodwill where everything is sold by the pound. Paid $13 for a $800 medical device.
I use it to get my fireplace going. Works like a charm.
It's great place to source wood if you like woodworking.
As old people die, their furniture ends up there. Young people seem to prefer particle board style furniture.
Happy me prefers real wood.
Young people seem to prefer particle board style furniture.
As a young(-ish) person myself, I can assure you that it's not that we prefer particle board, but rather that that's the majority of what's affordable out there. As I'm sure you're probably aware, unless you go thrifting like you just said, real wood stuff in general, let alone furniture, is usually very expensive.
id thrift more wood pieces but i dont have the tools/space to fix it up. also i move a lot and that stuff is HEAVY
Exactly. That's my situation too. I've found great furniture at Goodwills and (at the time) had the money to buy it, but I didn't have the room in my car for it, nor did I know anyone who did.
Prefer or can only afford great idea i never thought of non the less
I always wonder why the heirs don't keep the furniture
I always expect it's they don't have the room. Grandma did a reverse mortgage. So you don't get the house can't pay for storage fees. Might as well get rid of it.
Maybe there aren't any heirs. Or they're across the country, or it doesn't go with their decor. Etc.
Probably because it's brown and makes the room look like a barn. But not a trendy one.
Young people want to live their own lives, and part of that is choosing their furniture. You finally get a home of your own and the freedom to furnish it how you want and...oh I'm supposed to have all this old crap I don't really like.
Then your dad starts up with his shit. "Don't throw out that ratty yellowed old doily. I remember that from when I was a kid." "Okay, you take it." Here's a cabinet of gramma's china. They bought it for her out of a mail order catalog in the 30's so it's more sacred than god's glans.
We're also entering the era when the grandparents who are dying and leaving behind their furniture bought all their furniture from Sears and it's not much better than stuff you can get at Ikea, 40 years out of date, and seen 40 years of tobacco tar, cat piss and grampa farts.
I mean, you don't ask yourself why the heirs don't wear their grandparents' old clothes.
Nobody prefers particle board. Particle board is hot garbage.
Not so much weird, but it's weird that it's simultaneously hilarious and day-ruiningly depressing.
I saw a little bowl with small jewelry in it like charms and earrings. Among them was the right half of a heart that read "FRIENDS" and just below that was "EVER". I'm 100% certain that there exists somewhere the left half of that heart that reads "BEST" and "FOR" with identical formatting, and that friendship either ended dramatically or fizzled out over time.
It made me think about some previous close friendships I've had and how people can either just grow apart or have a violent falling out. And I wondered who in their right mind would buy just half of that best friends forever charm. Why would a thrift shop even have that available?
Kinda fascinating that an entire coming of age story can be told by just half of a piece of jewelry I found at a thrift store, and I'll never know the truth, yet I'll never forget it.
You were supposed to buy the charm and use it to find your soulmate
I once bought a custom engraved Zippo that said "Daddy believes in you" at a pawn shop for $15. I bought it for very similar reasons.
And I wondered who in their right mind would buy just half of that best friends forever charm.
anyone who would like to joke with their depression. I can imagine doing that.
now I actually want something like this
I was in a Goodwill when an insane person took over the stores PA system and started saying crazy shit. The weirdest thing was that I didn't see a single person reacting at all, it kept going on and on but everyone in the store was acting like it was totally normal. I couldn't handle it and had to get out of there because I was laughing too much and feeling creeped out at the same time.
If you don't mind, can you define crazy shit?
Like weird? Gross?
Untreated Schizophrenic ramblings?
Just weird nonsense, nothing explicitly gross. Closer to schizophrenic ramblings but more comedic because they were doing strange voices and sounded like they were having fun.
A little ziplock bag full of nipple clamps
3.5€ for a brand new cast iron wok. Instabuy.
Bob Ross head chia pet. I really wanted it so I opened the box to make sure the pot was inside. Found a dead lizard instead. Store employee had to properly dispose of the whole thing.
Like, no Bob Ross chia pet? Just the dead lizard? That's fucked.
Sorry, should have been clearer. The chia pet was inside too. Well, at least the pot was. I didn't really want to stick my hand in to see if the seeds were there too; on account of the dead lizard
Did the dead lizard have a green afro?
Off-brand "magic wand" sex toy
I think it goes without saying but please don't donate garbage to your local thrift store. In most cases they aren't even gonna put it on the shelf.
YOU SAY THAT - and are totally right - but that does bring back that memory I've got of seeing an utterly disgusting beer brewing kit being sold in the box for $10. The entire store smelled like decay.
I used to volunteer at my local thrift store and that sometimes meant going through donation boxes to determine what was worth keeping. Sometimes those bags had actual garbage in them. Lots of older men who didn't wash the back of their neck (or if they were in a home the nurse didn't)
We had two bags in the back for stuff we didn't keep. If it was actual garbage it went in the trash. If it was just unlikely to sell and someone was willing to make the trip it would go to Goodwill.
Some of the bags contained older men with dirty necks?
Looking back I provided absolutely zero context to that statement lol.
Their shirts. Men's button-up shirts, especially if they were white, would always have a big brown stain on inside collar where the shirt would rub up on the back of your neck. Those went in the trash.
Used to work at one a long time ago. The weirdest stuff is the stuff that never makes it to the floor. Take for example this framed picture of young Michael Jackson which we promptly hung on our wall in the back.
A full wallet among other wallets, perfectly disguised. Somebody left it there a few hours before. It was a guy from Scotland on a trip with his friends who went shopping for party clothes. He answered on Instagram (after much stalking) at midnight when I was already inside a club and they were on their way to the club too. So we rendez-vous at 6 AM after clubbing because they had a train at 8AM for another city. They left some joints at my place as a thank you. Also offered some ketch for a, I shit you not, "crunchy landing".
A failed 3D print. Some Pokémon missing a leg.
I volunteered at a thrift store years ago, and I was in charge of looking at the condition and prices of books that were donated. One person dropped off about 10 boxes filled to the brim with Playboy cartoons. They weren't worth anything and couldn't be put out on the floor anyway, so they were thrown out. I also remember that someone donated a biography of Benjamin Franklin from 1835. The cover was coming apart, but the pages were in wonderful condition. We sent that to a bigger thrift store in the area that ended up auctioning it for about $350.
I've volunteered for a few charity shops (UK version of a thrift store) in the past, the weirdest thing was the trash people would "donate", like used diapers.
One man's trash is another man's treasure
Gross story incoming...
In my 30's I worked with people with developmental disabilities. There was a 45 year old man I worked with occasionally who had brain damage from a fever when he was a baby. He had a strange fetish for dirty diapers and could not control it at all. If he smelled or saw a dirty diaper he was getting in there and there was no stopping it. I got called by his worker one day to help get him out of a dumpster. He found a bag of dirty diapers and was like a dog on a poop pile, rolling around and smearing it everywhere. Gross.
I saw a jacket full of syringes at GoodWill.
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~