Best thing to do is to spread out your search. Try a little of everything. I only really hunt in the wild in the summer and I'm not even that diehard about it, but I still manage to get good finds now and then. Sure, I leave empty-handed a lot, be it because there's nothing or because everything is overpriced, but persistence pays off. Heck, if I can find stuff when I only visit each thrift store maybe once every two weeks and half the time I go at night, anybody can. Just don't expect to always find amazing deals. Most of the time you have to settle on getting normal stuff for fair prices, even if nobody on here is going to be impressed. Also, it really helps if you're open about what you'll buy. If you go looking solely for, say, SNES games, you're not going to find stuff nearly as often if you're buying for multitudes of systems, even one's you may not own yet. Don't just look for stuff to go straight into your collection too. I'd say about half of my purchases are of duplicates or stuff I don't want. If I can resell and make a nice profit to put toward future game purchases, that's just as exciting as finding something I want. I think one of my very best finds was a complete, mint Secret of Monkey Island for PC, even though I don't collect PC games, because I bought it for 3 bucks and sold it for a whopping $125.