A short time ago in A Trip To The Thrift Stores I described one of the local stores as pricing their books pretty high and as a result their turnover was very slow Because of this nearly all the people in town looking for books had stopped going there.

Just a few days after writing that I made another visit to that thrift store around 11:00 in the morning. When I walked into their book room the shelves were nearly empty. As I was leaving I asked the woman behind the counter what happened to all the books.

Her response was that most of the books that were on the shelves had been there for more than a year and they were getting rid of them and putting new ones out. I said the reason they had been their that long was because they were priced too high. She told me she knew that and when new ones were put out they would be cheaper.

At 3:30 that afternoon I went back to find the same woman pulling books out of boxes and putting them on the shelves which were now about half full. I started building a pile of books. Most trade soft covers were priced at $.75. Mass market paperbacks were $.50. Hardcovers were mostly in the $1 to $2 range. About an hour later, when I left, I’d spent a little over $80 for several boxes of books.

The following day I went back again and the shelves were now full. This time my purchases came to a little over $65. When I paid for them the woman who had been shelving books the day before was once again behind the counter. We started talking and in the course of the conversation she told me they had boxes of books in storage that had dates on them showing they had been donated as long as three years ago. She also asked what kind of books I was interested in and gave her a general Idea.

I’ve been back every day since and each day the holes I left on the shelves the day before are filled. Most days there are also one or two boxes behind the counter containing books pertaining to the subjects I had told her I was interested in for me to look through. I’ve walked out of there each day with several good books, although nowhere near the number I bought the first two days.

The majority of them end up on Amazon and I’ve already sold enough have made a considerable profit above what I’ve spent so far.

Eventually one of the other book buyers in town will walk in there and the word will get around that it is now a good place to buy books. But until that time, I’m enjoying my time there and buying good inventory.

Some might say I got extremely lucky, but I prefer to think of it as a case of being persistent enough to keep putting myself in a place where good books had a chance to find me, even if it took quite a while before they did.

How persistent are you in your search for inventory for eBay? Have you given up on local shops or stores that never seem to pay off? They never will if you give up too early and stop checking fairly often.

Photograph by Greg Hickman.

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