Thrifting again

I finally did find some Series 1 yesterday afternoon, so I'll share my thoughts shortly on those. It's really nothing earth-shattering. I think the design is cool, I think the inserts are pretty boring and the sets too large. But I'll show off a few of the cards in an upcoming post.

Prior to venturing out to Target, I did my usual Saturday morning walk to the church thrift shop. It's a two-three minute walk, so I'm not exaggerating when I say how close it is.

As custom, I made a bee-line to the area where the cards would be, and immediately saw a binder sitting there mark $6.

Their pricing seems to be a little inconsistent, but I suppose it just depends on the volunteer working there. Last time I found binders there for $1 a piece, although this one was a little larger. Still, $6 for this wasn't a horrible deal, as the binder and pagers were in good shape, which isn't always the case.

I quickly flipped through it to make sure it wasn't utter junk. Some junk = expected. Full of junk = leave it there for someone else. I saw plenty in there to make me grab it.

The binder was about 60% baseball and 40% basketball. Nothing newer than maybe 1993 or 1994. The real reason I wanted it was because there were quite a few Michael Jordan cards in there, mostly from the Playoffs, but a nice base Upper Deck as well. You can't go wrong with a handful of Jordans.

There were also a lot of Phoenix Suns cards, which makes sense because the Bulls and Suns matched up in the Finals in 1993, right around when most of these cards were from.

The baseball cards had quite a few HOFers, mostly from early editions of Stadium Club. While I think the 1990 Griffey is awesome, unfortunately it was in pretty bad condition.

Overall, very solid purchase for $6. Good entertainment value, good Jordans, good binder, and good Ultra Pro pages. Can't ask for much more than that. I'm impressed with how frequently this little church thrift store is delivering cards for me.

Another cool thrift store find

Stopping at a local church thrift store on Saturday mornings is becoming a ritual for me.

I have one just a couple blocks from my house, and easily walkable at that. It opens from 10-1 on Saturdays and 10-2 on Tuesdays, I believe. My daughter finishes dance class at 10am, so once my wife arrives home, I usually had out for a quick morning stroll.

Most days, I'll go to the post office first, which is also walkable. And on the way back, I'll swing by the thrift store. It's basically what you'd expect. Mostly junk in the basement of the church. Only once have I found cards worth buying, a large binder for $5 you can read about here. Since then, I've only seen cards once, and it was a bunch of utter junk in plastic cases for $.25 a card. Not worth it.

I've bought some other stuff here and there. I found a cool electric slot car track there back in December. I've also found a few Wii games for my son, as all games and DVDs are $1, regardless of how new or old.

Anyhow, this past Saturday, I went to the post office at 10 to mail a package to Kerry over at Cards on Cards. On my way back, I swing by the thrift store, and immediately spotted two binders of cards!

I made a beeline past a guy who was looking at comic books and grabbed the binders. There were marked $1 each and in good condition. Each had maybe 20-25 pages, also in good condition. At quick glance, I spotted mostly junk, but did see a few cards of players of note, so I decided it would be worth the $2.

I also saw eight PS4 games on a very bottom shelf, and snagged them all. (Side note, but I sold them the same day on FB marketplace for $35 total. That's how you turn $8 into $35.)

Overall, I paid $10 ($2 for the cards + $8 for the video games), which is exactly the amount of cash I had, and headed home. I knew I wasn't going to find anything too great in the binders, but for 40% of the price of a Walgreen's repack, it still felt worth it.

I was right there was mostly junk, but I did find a lot of fun cards. I'd say it was 80% baseball, 18% basketball and maybe 2% hockey cards.

The first page(s) that jumped out at me were a bunch of 2000 Newark Bears cards. That makes sense to me, as I live just about 15 minutes from Newark and pass where the Bears once played everyday on my commute to work.

A few names jumped out at me, especially this guy:

Ozzie Canseco! I've got this card headed to Mario at Wax Heaven, a Canseco brothers completist. Apparently this quite a hard card to find for Canseco collectors. I probably could have gotten a few bucks for it on the open market, but Mario will appreciate it more, so off to him it goes.

A few other interest names: Bobby Bonds! I had no idea there was a Bobby Bonds, the son.

And Joe Borowski actually won a game for the '98 Yanks!

The oldest card in the binders was actually tucked into one of the font pockets, this Pete Rose/Steve Carlton Phillies Leaders. Kind of cool.

There were  a few MLB Showdowns, including a couple HOFers.

And some new and old HOFers:

Hey, I know this guy!

The only Yankee I found was a cool Topps Total of Jorge Posada.

This card was very interesting, a promo card to find local card shops. It no longer works. I called the number and and an automated voice asked if I was over 50. Actually, maybe it was working, now that I think about it.

There were some fun art cards too! I remember the Charlie Ward card from when I was growing up.

Among the basketball cards, a lot of Pippen and Rodman. No MJ, unfortunately.

And a very sweet Penny Hardaway.

This card was cool to see. King Rice was from my town, and went on to play at UNC. That is a pretty big deal. He's currently the head coach at Monmouth.

While I know little about hockey, I do know that none of them were massive names other than who I recognized.

There was only football card as well, but it was of a good name!

So that's it. Worth the $2? I'd say so. Fun times, and hopefully I find another treasure at the thrift store soon!

Substitute thrift shopping

I have a thrift store that is just about 3 blocks from my house. So only a few hundred steps.

It sits in the basement of a local church, and is open on Tuesdays and Saturdays. I wish it were open more frequently, but I understand that the people who work there are volunteers. When we have nothing going on a particular Saturday, which is rare, I try to make the walk down at 10am in search of cards.

My best find there was a giant binder of cards for $5 (read about it here). Rarely do they have new cards and they get tired of me asking each time I go in. However, I saw a guy one time paying just as I was getting there and he had a massive bin of cards that just come in and not even hit the floor yet. I could just tell he was an aggressive thrift store shopper and probably spends all of his Saturday bouncing around from shop to shop and trying to do the same. Part of the reason I try to get there at 10am when I go is because I know he might be lurking again ready to buy cards on my home turf.

Anyhow, the shop was close from mid-July through August 25, as a I read on a sign last time I went. I excitedly made my way there yesterday thinking of all the new cards they must have gotten in while the shop was closed for the summer.

To my disappointment, I arrived and saw the shop was not yet open. One of the ladies told me there were some plumbing issues they were fixing (basement of an old church, mind you), and it likely wouldn't be open until later in September. Bummer. But all was not lost!

They were having a substitute sale in an all-purpose room in the church. I ventured in and saw a few tables set up. I'm not sure the rhyme or reason for what was displayed, but it seemed like a little of everything. There were no cards, but immediately my eye saw these.

Originally I looked and put them back while I browsed for more cards and looked at a tennis racquet (my kid has one and has been bugging me to get my own to play). Unfortunately the racquet looked like it would fall apart if I used it. I should just suck it up and buy one for $20 on Amazon for the three times I'll actually use it.

Anyhow, I noticed a guy with a gray ponytail looking at the Murray sculptures. I pulled out my phone to see how these sell on eBay, and a few sold for above $20 each. The man put them back and moved on. I went over and picked them up again, and asked the lady how much they were, as they were one of the few items with no price tag. She said $1 each.

I figured I couldn't let them just sit there, even if I didn't have a plan or a need for them. I forked over the $2 and made my way out, bummed I didn't find cards but excited I found something I could likely profit off of at some time.

This is not my image because I didn't want to open them, but here is what the statue looks like:

I'm still not positive which way I'll go. I'll probably try Facebook marketplace first to avoid shipping, but I can't imagine many Orioles fans around here. eBay seems like my best bed, but I'd need to charge around $15 shipping, as the boxes aren't small. If neither of those work, we're having a town-wide garage sale next month and I'll try to move them there for a couple bucks each, remembering that I only paid $1 each to begin with and have no real need for them. I just don't want the cost of my time to make these a nuisance, so whatever ends up working with the least amount of legwork.

Still, I couldn't just let them sit there.

Thrift shop card finds!

Something happened to me for the first time on Saturday. I found cards at a local thrift shop!

I’ve always been envious of collectors who show off their thrift store finds. Admittedly, I’m not one to hop around from shop to shop and make a day of it, so no wonder I never find any. However, I do have a thrift shop in the basement of a church just three blocks from my house, and I’ve stopped in from time to time without finding much of anything. Everything seems pretty run down and there is a lot of junk. I guess it’s like any other thrift shop, isn’t it?

I live on a street just off of the main road in town, and still have a “walker’s mentality” from my time living in NYC and Hoboken. I have no problem taking a short walk to run an errand. In this case, I had two errands. I first went to the barbershop for a haircut, and once that was done, walked another block to the post office to mail a package to Brian atCollecting Cutch.

I didn’t have any more cash. I brought exactly enough for my haircut (including tip), and then used my credit card at the post office. I still decided to swing by the thrift shop on the way home. After all, it’s only open on Saturdays and Tuesdays. I went in. Cashless.

I made my way over to the books and DVDs, and then I saw them. Two binders and a box of cards! Whhhhat?!

I grabbed the first binder, which was of all basketball cards and marked for $5. I took a quick scan to see if I saw any late ‘90s inserts that go for quite a penny these days, but didn’t see anything too interesting. It’s entirely possible I missed something good, but haven’t collected basketball cards in years and don’t have a keen eye in that area.

Then I grabbed the baseball binder. It was a big ass binder too. H-e-a-v-y. This was marked $5 as well. I started flipping through, and while some of the cards looked ok, I didn’t think this would be for me. Everything was basically from 1997-2002 or so (admittedly an era of cards I like a lot), and there were a lot of cards; cards I’m currently trying to get rid of in a big box…so why would I buy more? I flipped through for a minute and then put the binder back.

I then quickly looked at the longer box, which was mostly football cards that weren’t of interest to me. And I left the store. Yep, I left. Empty-handed. I didn’t want to spend the $5.

In the literally three minute walk home, I had a change of heart. It would be fun to go through, I thought. And you never know what might be tucked away. Plus, the very day was my 7^th blog anniversary. I had do something card-related, right?

But the $5 price tag felt a little steep. This is a thrift shop, I said. Shouldn’t it be like 2 bucks? But then I realized something. I routinely spend $4.99 on Walgreen’s repacks, or buy a handful of Dollar Tree repacks. Why am I ok with paying 5 bucks at Walgreen’s for 100 cards that are mostly junk, when I could pay $5 for this and got a lot more cards, easily over 1,000. Plus I saw a few Hall of Famers and interesting cards in my quick scan in the store. And it would last a lot longer than a repack.

I changed my mind.

I got home and ran in the house and grabbed five one dollar bills and told my wife I was headed back to grab something. I walked very fast back to the store, worried some thrift shop vulture may have seen me thumbing through them and then scooped up the binder himself, Vegas slot machine style.

Luckily, I got back and it was there! $5 later and a binder in hand, I headed home.

As noted, it was a pretty big binder. He’s are two photos, one for scale. 

It consisted of 70 pages, mostly filled with card on the front and back of each page. That alone would be 18 cards per page, or 1260 cards. Some had three or four cards in each slot as well.

All-in-all, there were exactly 1,291 cards in the binder. Of those, 133 were of Hall of Famers (stack pictured below), mostly newish ones at that. That doesn’t include the Wade Boggs cards which went into my Yankees pule. There were 54 Yankee cards.

Ok, enough rambling. Here are some cards. This is really just a random sampling to show what I found.

By far, my two favorite cards were these 1995 Topps Cybserstats Season in Review cards. Honestly, they are strikingly gorgeous cards. I’m not sure how a card like this were to be viewed if it were new in 2018, but a lot of cards from the mid to late 90s have far superior graphics and designs to current insert sets. That is a fact.

Another interesting card was this double-sided 1994 Donruss Bomb Squad card. One bomb = one home run. There would probably be outrage if this card showed up in 2018.

There were a lot of 1998 Metal in the binder. Probably close to 50 or 60. No issues with that on my end, as I loved these sets.

This person really liked this Score Goin Yard subset.

I think I would have gotten along well with this collector. There were a ton of Collector’s Choice, Opening Day, Circa, Sports Illustrated, and other brands I really enjoyed as a kid.

There were also severalUpper Deck Folz Vending machine mini cards. I had never seen these. They are a little bit smaller than the size of a normal card, but don’t jump out as a mini. They also look like like Collector's Choice cards, but are not branded as such.

There weren’t too many oddballs.

As for the Hall of Famers, I mentioned there were 133. Here’s who appeared the most:

Greg Maddux – 16 cards

Roberto Alomar – 15 cards

John Smoltz/Barry Larking/Tony Gwynn – 12 cards each

Ivan Rodriguez – 9 cards

 

And the Yankees! Tino made an appearance.

Boggs was in there a lot, as was Big Daddy.

There was a lot more too!

Am I glad I spent the $5? Easily. I didn’t find anything super valuable, but I really enjoyed going through the cards, and know I’ll be including some in upcoming trade packages. It was definitely money well spent when I think about the alternative of a 100-card repack. I mean, nearly 1300 cards from the late 90s? Hard to beat for this collector.

The binder and pages aren’t particularly in great shape, so what I think I might do is steal a few to cut up for PWEs, and then stuff the binder back full of other cards and bring it back to the thrift shop for someone else to buy.

Either way, I’ll definitely be stopping by regularly to look for cards. It’s a three minute walk from house. I’d be crazy not to.