Sunday evening the auctions for the first week of the March $1000 A Month Thrift Store eBay Challenge ended. As I’ve already said, I was pretty lazy the week before. To make matters worse, of the twelve thrift store items listed, only four sold for a pretty dismal total of $50.06. Most of the unsold items will go directly into the eBay store, but one or two may be re-listed.
By the time I’d decided to continue the Challenge through March, most of the week had already passed and I was still in a lazy mood, so there aren’t a lot of thrift store items listed this week either. I did get motivated on Friday and made the rounds of all seven stores and was able to buy a few things. One of these was the Watkins salesman’s sample case I’d mentioned earlier, since they lowered the asking price. I also bought a nice Bakelite poker chip caddy along with a large number of old poker chips.
After one week of completed auctions, here’s how the figures for March look so far. All four items that sold have already been paid for with PayPal so the first weeks figures are complete.
| Ended | Sold | Cost | List Fees | FV Fees | PayPal Fees | Incid. Fees | Miles | Net Profit |
| Mar. 4 | $50.06 | $10.00 | $10.60 | $2.62 | $3.30 | $0.00 | $4.00 | $19.52 |
| Mar 11 | $86.50 | $15.80 | $8.00 |
This week’s auctions will be in two parts. Friday evening I went to Minneapolis for the weekend for a family get-together, so there wasn’t time to photograph and write ads for all the articles I purchased on Friday. These items will go live later today (Tuesday) and will run as five-day auctions so they end on Sunday evening as the rest of last weeks purchases do.
Here are the thrift store items purchased last week, along with what I paid for each item, that make up the second week of March’s Challenge. They won’t all show up on eBay until this evening when the five-day auctions launch.
- Light His Fire 6 Cassette Set - a re-list from last week
- 2003 NASCAR Winston Cup Deluxe Yearbook - $1.00
- Camaro Restoration Handbook - $0.50
- Watkins Salesman’s Sample Case - $50.00
- Field Shooting & Hunter’s Clay Games VHS Video - $0.75
- How To Restore Your Chevrolet Pickup - $0.50
- Lorenzo Studio Pipe - $3.00 (I have no idea if this will sell, but I thought “why not try”)
- Lot Of 275 Vintage Clay Poker Chips - see the next item
- Green Catalin Bakelite Poker Chip Caddy - I paid $25.00 for this and the poker chips above
- Peter Capstick’s Africa A Return to the Long Grass - $0.50
- Sporting Clay Shooting VHS Video - $0.75
- Sporting Clays With NSCA And Winchester VHS Video - $0.75
- Winchester: The Early Years VHS Video - $0.75
- Star Trek Voyager “Caretaker Script” - $1.00
- The Book Of Heat - $0.25
- The Last Lap - $0.50
- Verdict - $0.25
- 5 Fire King Coffee Mugs - $0.50
- Yunnan School A Renaissance In Chinese Painting - $0.50
Once everything is live later tonight, there will be nineteen thrift shop items listed for the second week of the challenge. Then all I need to do is cross my fingers and hope they help make up some ground. I have a school play that one of my granddaughters is in on Wednesday evening so I’ll be in town all week which means I’ll probably be a regular visitor to the thrift stores this week.
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March 6th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Gary,
On your yearbooks that didn’t sell…stick them in your eBay store for $50-$75 and wait for them to sell there!! It might take awhile, but they WILL sell!!!
Second I want to thank you for the info you once gave about the Stampin’ Up stamps!! I’d like to share an experience that happened to me not long after you recommended we add them to our “look-for lists”.
Here in Upstate NY where I live its common for entire towns to hold “Town Days” where they have garage sales that sometimes can encompass from 60% to 90% of the entire community.
Well anyway I was out at one of these town sales about 20 min. from where I live and my custom is to drive to the section of the town where the FEWEST number of people seem to be.
Well anyway I went down a street where I didn’t see much activity and parked my Dodge Caravan with the “I Ebay 4 U” license plates and we got out and started looking around.
I went to a couple of houses, but not finding anything exciting, I crossed to the other side of the street and noticed a woman just starting to set stuff out. As is my custom, I asked her if she’d like my help carrying out any boxes that might be too heavy.
She said sure, that she had a bunch of “stamping stuff” a woman had left in her basement when she lived there, 3 years earlier, but never returned to pick up.
Well to make a long story short it turns out the woman had been a Stampin’ Up distributor at one point and I was able to purchase FIVE (5) banana boxes filled with Stampin UP sets, most were retired, the Stampin’ Around stamp roller heads with handles & ink cartridges, many of those were also retired, not to mention all the Idea books, patterns etc.
Well I paid the woman $50 (she asked for $30) and loaded them into the van. She thanked me for my help (SHE THANKED ME?? lol!!), and off I went!!
The reason I bring this up is because I was getting all my figures together last week to take to my tax guy and discovered that my original $50 investment on those items realized a gross profit of close to $3,500 after everything was sold.
The highest selling single set sold for $309.00 (a promo set only available to demonstrators), and I sold a single stamping roller head for $112.90, also a special demonstrator only promo item.
That’s a $3000+ net profit I would never have realized had I not been exposed to your info, but more importantly I put myself out there on a consistent basis to find it.
I hear folks say all the time how they, “can never find any stuff!” My question is are you looking consistently??
I was once told, “No education is free”, but no education is worthwhile if it isn’t put into action.
Gary, the information you distribute freely has made me $1000’s of $$$, but I wouldn’t have made a dime if I hadn’t acted on the info!!
Thanks for the education on everything from local town history books to Fire King mugs…keep it coming!!