Share your pickup loot and finds

[JSoup]

There's a thrift store here in town that's known far and wide around central California as a great place to pick up stuff for resellers. Piles of stuff finds it's way through there, I've personally picked up a number of expensive items over the years for a couple bucks. They're still great to this day, but they don't deal in video game stuffs any more. None of what comes to them does so as discarded items, it's not a Salvation Army shop. Games/gaming stuff worth actual money are sold via other methods before it even becomes stock they can use. So, the token glass case of gaming stuff is normally just Wii/360 sports games. I think the rarest thing I ever found was a back of PC gaming manuals one of the employees tossed in a clear bag and hung on a random hook. Aside from that, the local flea markets are the main place to find game stuffs, but it's all people trying to sell at marked up ebay prices.

I'm part of the problem too, though. The odd times I look at gaming sections, nothing looks particularly interesting these days, so impulse buys are way, way down. I turned away from collecting proper...actually not long after I first joined DP.

[Gameguy]

I enjoy the posts still being posted in this thread, I've been meaning to contribute somewhat too but I've just not got around to it. I rarely find actual video game items anymore and mostly just buy VHS, cassette tapes, or CDs for myself and I'm not sure if these items would be interesting to anyone else here. I have found a few video game items I could have posted here though.

There is a thrift store close to me that I still visit regularly, but there are professional pickers or resellers that basically visit this store daily right at opening until the sorting staff go home in the afternoon. They tend to fight over the carts of merchandise and media right as they're being brought out so it's hard for anyone else to really find anything worth buying. I do still find things for myself including more practical items which is why I still go, and they do occasionally miss good items of actual value but this is still a bit uncommon. I do end up hearing from them about the items they find, including actual good video games which are sometimes quite valuable, but this is usually followed by bragging about how much they're worth or how much they were sold for a profit.

There is a flea market that opened up near me a couple years ago, but I don't really find anything to buy as it's all too expensive. Well maybe I found some CDs or cassettes a few times. I don't know why but I just don't like the atmosphere of this place so I don't actually like going, though there are a few vendors I like and do talk to when I do go, though I don't actually buy anything from them. There's even a few video game vendors, one that even offers repairs to consoles including vintage ones and apparently pays fair values when buying games, but I don't feel comfortable at his store for some reason and I can't explain why. There was a good flea market I enjoyed going to but it closed down over a decade ago and replaced with a housing development.

What I have noticed is that plenty of liquidation type stores have opened up around my area, the type that offers bins to dig through mostly full of Amazon returns or similar items and the pricing differs based on the day of the week. I generally hate these stores. Mostly just cheap poor quality crap from Amazon but still high priced and irritating to dig through these bins just to see what's there. Mostly items I have no need for so it's really a waste of time for me to visit these stores.

[JSoup]

We had a 'everything else' thread for finds at one point or another, I know I had a few posts in at least one. Probably not an issue to just post your non-gaming finds here. Ha, even if it's not ok, there's not enough people posting here to complain about it.