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I had a really nice week of scavenging online, winning a variety of items mostly for my trading card consignment port. The cards highlight was probably this 12 card women’s basketball set from 2008 which I won for $0.99 plus shipping. Those cards are from the infancy of women’s trading card sets, when there was maybe one set every year, so anything with a serial number (these cards are /444) of notable players (there are a few women’s hall of famers in the set) carries some value. Plus Team USA basketball has a strong collector’s base since both men’s and women’s basketball have dominated international competition for decades. I should make anywhere between $50 and $150 profit on this auction without a lot of effort.
I won these And1 blue & white sneakers for $0.99 plus a large shipping charge, but I bought 40 items from this seller and my total shipping cost was $45. So my COGS is something like $10 on these sneaks. I’d keep them for myself if I had a foot shrinker, but they’re one size too small for me, so I’ll start the listing at $100 and see what happens. North Carolina Tar Heels colors so I think they’ll sell fast, but I’ll be happy to sell these for $50.
I’m not sure whether I’ll make a lot of profit on this Cleveland Browns All-Pro student contract, but it only cost me $5 and I thought it was neat. I’ll have to think a little bit about what category would make the most sense for this item. My suspicion is that this is one of those very niche items where it sells for pennies in the wrong category and a decent amount in the right category to the right buyer, as long as they can find my listing. I think I can add some value by packaging it with some Browns cards, too.
What do you find this week?
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Picked up two large volumes of engineering magazines at the Saturday junk market. “American Machinist” of 1923, and “Machinery Design” of 1916. The latter’s published in London; has numerous articles on manufacturing weaponry. For example, a seven-page article with diagrams and photos on how to manufacture an 18-pound high explosive shell, finishing with a photo of a Canary Girl supervising the drying of the varnish on the shell cases. “How To Feed Two Thousand Men In Fifteen Minutes” with the aid of a string quartet in evening dress. “Speeding Up In An Engineering Factory”- an attempt to make semi-skilled machinists quadruple their hourly output, which ended up, after a strike, with the tripling of output using a third of the original labour force.
Nothing about tanks- there’s some mention of “bull dozers” so I suppose some of the writers must have been “in the know”.
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Right before I went away on my last trip I found two large bags of needlework kits for $6 apiece. I opened them on my return yesterday and many are good subject matter and almost all are sealed and 70s vintage. 66 kits in all for 19 cents a kit. The same local thrift chain store has others priced individually in the same bin for $8-10 a kit. Obviously different workers are pricing and I got someone lazy that day, probably a dude filling in for the lady pricers. Hurray!
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@christiner “Eight dollars? That’s just like, your opinion, man”
I listed the American Machinist volume, put in the weight in the item specifics, and now the listing displays the price per kilogram in brackets like it was vegetables on a market stall.
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Ha! Just googled “needlework kit” and it turns out it’s called “cross-stitch” in the UK. I rarely see the kits, but there’s loads of pattern books in the thrift shops. Every shop also has a cross-stitch fire screen from the 1950s, done in Ye Olde Elizabethan style, with flowers and vines.
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If we’re talking cross stitch, there is surprising money in some vintage pattern books and modern more artistic designs. Basically the stuff that you can’t find in a big chain hobby store. Plus these items are usually cheap out in the wild. Not quite $6 for a big, but cheap. Whoever priced that bag should do the pricing for everything.
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I’ve done very well with UK and Danish cross stitch kits $80-100+. Also some USA Christmas kits can be worth a lot and Dimensions Gold Collection. I haven’t really tried pattern books. These are still pretty overlooked in my area at this point.
I also save completed canvas works on occasion if they are French or good subject matter. Once in a while I’ll even remove them from a frame.
I learned about these from ThePaperCastle rummage saler on Youtube. Even the newer ones have a bar code and are easy to list and ship. However, the newer or boring vintage ones seem to be moving more slowly for me in the past year or so.
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