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08/11/2007: What’s the deal?

Busy working on a ToyFare article tonight, so this may be a good time for a patented SNT survey.

What’s the best deal you’ve ever gotten? Garage sales, store clearance sales, eBay hiccups — they all apply. I have some great stories, but I’ll save them for the comments thread. See you in a bit.


Posted by Matt. E-mail me!

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Discussion Thread: 201 comments

Okay, I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen TMNT 2 before, but I’m watching the beginning before bed. I saw a one-liner that I feel like I somehow need to work into my conversation tomorrow. At some point, I will need to scream “Combat coldcuts!”

Ghosted by spaz307 @ 08/13/2007 1:12 AM EDT

When I was about eight, I literally stumbled across 80 bucks in cash in an underground parking lot! Wind blew a 20 my way, then another, then another, then ANOTHER! I looked around for a possible owner and waited a while, but when no-one claimed it, I went into the mall and bought myself some shiny new figurines. I can’t remember what they were now (possibly Transformers), but who cares? They were bought with free parking lot money!

Ghosted by Kamuke @ 08/13/2007 3:48 AM EDT

Oh crap, french toast and bacon? What the hell is wrong with me? I got loads and loads of Intellevision games, the system and Intellivoice add-on. In the selection of games was Congo Bongo, complete. Two auctions on ebay right now have it going for $150.00 and $175.00. Lots of other rarities, along with some being two copies, one sealed . I’m pretty sure I bought some sorry kids collection from his stupid attic space conscious mom.

Ghosted by dohopoki @ 08/13/2007 5:45 AM EDT

A professor of mine saw a few of my tiny Star Trek models on my desk one day, and he said he had some Star Trek stuff he wouldn’t mind getting rid of, as they were just taking up space in his garage. So I went to his house and he pulls out 4 large boxes of various Star Trek collectibles. I really wanted it all, but was scared as to how much it would cost me. My professor looks at his wife and says “What price do you think is fair? $20?” I nearly fainted. I went from having 6 miniature ships to over 80 figures (20 MOC!) among other items, instantly making my Star Trek collection almost as large as my Star Wars collection which I’ve been collecting my entire life!

Ghosted by doubleofive @ 08/13/2007 8:58 AM EDT

You know when you’re checking out at Wal-Mart, that big bin of terrible DVDs for $1? Well, they’re almost universally overpriced pieces of crap, even at $1. But one magical day, my eyes scanned over the DVDs and I saw – Night of the Living Dead! The original classic movie, on DVD, for a dollar! I was jazzed about that one.

Ghosted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 9:21 AM EDT

I forgot to say how much that stuff cost me, it was a dime.

Ghosted by dohopoki @ 08/13/2007 9:50 AM EDT

Oh man, Patton Oswald made the greatest Star Wars joke about Chyna (sp?) on the Flavor Flav roast. Too funny.

Ghosted by squee4242 @ 08/13/2007 11:01 AM EDT

Flavor Flav needs more than a roast. He needs Chuck D’s boot up his ass.

Ghosted by Knegative @ 08/13/2007 11:17 AM EDT

So, Some SSBB news: There’ll be a Pokemon trainer character who switches between Ivysaur, Squirtle, and Charizard.

Why not Ash? Why not May? Why not Dawn? What is with these no-name trainers anyway. There is no reason to give anyone the choice of playing a no-name guy if the girl is the real one who’s going to be featured in the anime anyway.

Stupid gender ideas and masculinity. Anyone who uses Lucas is an idiot :P Hikari, ftw.

Ghosted by Knegative @ 08/13/2007 11:47 AM EDT

I got a stack of OLD Sesame Street 45 RPM records at a garage sale for like 50 cents each….I mean these were old, when Oscar was still orange before the green we know now.

Ghosted by Melissa Y. @ 08/13/2007 12:41 PM EDT

I thought of another great deal. I was drooling over a pair of $300 RayBans for months but just could not bring myself to spend the money on them since I was just a teenager and my job was not the highest paying. One night after work I was walking to my car and I spotted a bag under my driver side, kinda under my tire but not quite so I looked around to make sure there was no one in the area waiting to attack me (safety first) and then picked up the bag (jumped in my car and locked the doors…again safety first). It turned out to be the same pair I had wanted! Someone had bought them, paid cash according to the receipt, and promptly dropped the bag on the way to their car. I had that pair for years and I would like to thank my anonymous donor. They looked good on me! Few things can trump a pair of RayBans from the Gods!

Ghosted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 12:47 PM EDT

Time to check some of your local stores, fellow posters! It’s nearing the end of the Quarter, and the shelves at my Wal-Mart are getting re-arranged. Clearance racks are popping up, and that means that Hallowe’en isn’t that far away from getting an all-too-short section in the store. Support your local All Hallows’, it shows we do have power over the Dark!

Ghosted by kingklash @ 08/13/2007 1:11 PM EDT

magic toy – i dunno if body count sampled psycho or not but i know busta rhymes had a pretty big hit that was just a loop of the psycho theme with some drums, this would’ve been a bit later than 93 though (probably 95-97)

Ghosted by worldofbong @ 08/13/2007 4:13 PM EDT

Cricket – Your story doesn’t so much sound like a “great deal” as “taking property that’s not yours.” Although in the grand scheme of things, taking something for free might be the best deal of all.

Ghosted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 4:25 PM EDT

I got the old, large sized, illustrated versions of the first four books in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series for $2 each! I was willing to pay a LOT more than that for them. Also I got the entire boxed set of ‘the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ for $12.

Ghosted by Muppet Baby @ 08/13/2007 4:27 PM EDT

My best friend got a new PC, so I bought his old one for $150. It’s a pretty good system, and I’ve been upgrading it. It has 2 gigs of RAM in it, and an old motherboard. The RAM type, however, is RDRAM, which sells for a lot ($300 a stick retail). I have 4 sticks of it in this thing, so when it comes time to upgrade the motherboard, I’ll sell the RAM and have around $1000 to buy parts.

Ghosted by Char Aznable @ 08/13/2007 4:50 PM EDT

Me again with more fucktarded Nine Inch Nails great deals. Five minutes ago I just won an ebay auction for a United Kingdom DVD single for 2 bucks, plus 3 shipping. It was limited as hell, and now usually goes for 30 plus shipping or thereabouts. it’s amazing what happens when someone posts shit in a place no one else sees it.

Ghosted by Justin B @ 08/13/2007 4:51 PM EDT

I was `wrong, it was in pounds, not dollars, i got it for twice what I thought, which is still cheap but not nearly as good.

Ghosted by Justin B @ 08/13/2007 4:58 PM EDT

tanta07 – Some of you people need to slow your roll! To set the record straight I did in fact put a notice up at the store they were purchased at and at guest relations that I found newly purchased glasses and to contact me if you could describe them. No one responded. They were paid for in cash so I could not trace them via credit card. It is not like I saw someone drop them and kept them, they dropped them and did not notice and did not make any effort to recover them. Therefore I do not think of it as taking property that is not mine. Possession is 9/10th of the law and I made a reasonable effort to return them! If I had taken them to a police department I would have gotten them after 30 days of not being claimed. In all fairness you might have felt differently about my post if I had included this information the first time around but I was in a hurry in my last post so I cut to the chase.

How come your not ripping on p@trick for not returning the coke to the dealer who dropped it? That is technically taking property that is not yours! I am sure the dealer would have liked to get his “stuff” back (not to mention his money)! ;-)

I am not the kind of person who steals from others for my own gain or anyone elses for that matter. Shoot, I am not even the kind of person who will hang up on or yell at a telemarketer because I figure that at the very least they are trying to make a living. I politely decline their offer 10 times or whatever until they finally give up on me.

Ghosted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 4:59 PM EDT

Hey, Cricket – why did no one take the glasses back? Did the guest relations desk not have a lost and found drawer? It seems weird that you walk up with a lost item, and they let you walk off with it. Anyway, you don’t have to prove anything to me, so enjoy the glasses.

Sorry, I didn’t see the post about Coke…

Ghosted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 5:22 PM EDT

Once, on a whim, I asked a music store manager if he’d sell me his entire rack of dollar CDs for $50. It was about 30 seconds until he closed up for the night, and I guess he was looking to make some last minute cash, ’cause he agreed. When I got home, I counted them, and found out that I had bought 317 CDs. For $50. Sure a lot of them were crap, but there were FAR more than $50 worth of good ones in there.

Just last year I went to the same CD store which now sells used comics used books. Again, I went at night, right before they were closing up for the evening. They were having a huge clearance sale to get rid of stuff before moving to a new location, and the guy had what must have been a thousand comics, maybe even 1500, all on sale for a quarter each. And guess who was behind the counter? The same fucking guy. I decided to open negotiations by low-balling him. I told him I’d give him $30 for all the comics in the store. I was ready to dance, and fully expected him to take me up to $100, which was where I was prepared to go, but then he said something I will never forget:

“Yeah, I’ll take $30.”

WHAT?!? I win, just like that? I’m just not used to that. Usually life makes me work a little harder for a payoff, but not that time. He even had one of his employees help me carry the boxes to my car, and it took two trips. Fuckin’ a!

I’m not sure which of those is the better score, so I’m posting them both. As an aside, I also recently bought 144 packets of Ghoul-Aid Scary Blackberry on eBay for $34, still shrink-wrapped in the Halloween themed haunted house display boxes. Although that’s not an exceptional deal monetarily speaking, I just wanted to throw it out there to make Matt jealous. Happy Halloween, buddy! :)

Ghosted by Chris @ 08/13/2007 6:01 PM EDT

I am not sure if it is the same with all of them but the Guest Relations Lost & Found at my mall was staffed mostly by teenagers who tended to keep the better items “Lost” rather than found so I just left a notice there. The manager at the sunglass store told me to hang on to them because it was not their responsibilty but they put the notice by the register just in case the shopper came back. I did my civic duty, I checked back periodically at both L&F and the store, no one claimed them in 30 days so I enjoyed them for many years after.

Matt has gone missing again!

Ghosted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 6:26 PM EDT

You guys! I went to Wendy’s for lunch today and they totally gave me change from a $20 when I only gave them a $10! Kind soul that I am, I let the girl know and gave back the extra change. And then proceeded to drive away without my delicious chocolate Frosty. Just goes to show you, no good deed goes unpunished ;)
In another incidence of life imitating X-E, or something like that, I went to a double feature of Hot Fuzz/Shaun of the Dead yesterday and Edgar Wright was there and did a Q and A. Someone asked his favorite buddy comedies and he mentioned The Last Boy Scout! I swear I was the only person there who even knew the movie, but it was still cool.

Ghosted by squee4242 @ 08/13/2007 6:50 PM EDT

My mom is the queen of grocery coupons. She has them for almost anything, and we never pay full price for anything really.

In the same realm, when I was little a grocery store used to have a little known policy that if you found any item in the store that was past its expiration date, you could bring it to the checkout with a fresh one and get the fresh one for free. Being about 7 years, I took this as my mission, and since the store was incredibly lazy, we cleaned house in free food everytime we went to that store. We even got a whole frozen turkey for free once, and those run about $20-30! Needless to say, they eventually caught on a couple months later and stopped the policy.

Continuing with the food, I loved Fitz’s rootbeer when I was little and wrote them a lovely little kid letter telling them how much I loved it and came home from school one day to find they had sent me a whole case for free!

I’d say those are pretty good deals.

Ghosted by hope @ 08/13/2007 9:09 PM EDT

I found a first edition of Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (from 1916!) in extremely good condition (some cover scuffing aside) at Goodwill. I paid five bucks for it.

Ghosted by Wukong @ 08/13/2007 9:44 PM EDT

A little late for SNT, I know, but thought it was a good topic. I actually get great deals on records (lp’s) all the time as there is a record store about an hour north of me in some rat infested building that sells records for no more than $5 for the most part. I have purchased about 100 records over the last two years, and never spent more than $3 on any one. They have a few that are over that mark, but those are usually ones I am not interested in, as I don’t care about still packaged Beatles lp’s.

I got the entire Led Zep collection on vinyl for around $15 since I through IV were sold as a set for $7.

I also have been getting awesome deals on Ebay for NES games. Bought 18 games, including Contra, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out! and SMB 1-3 for about $25 total, and got the system for $12 plus $5 s/h. Best part was I got the Game Genie thrown in free cause the guy was getting rid of all his NES stuff.

Ghosted by adjohnson @ 08/13/2007 10:04 PM EDT

Oi. Another Wii Update. I actually have had it freeze up coming back from the Internet channel.

THANKS NINTENDO!!!

Ghosted by Knegative @ 08/14/2007 12:37 AM EDT

For $15, I got 25-30 VHS tapes of Star Trek TNG. And not those slipcover, single episode ones either. They were the clamshell “Special Edition” tapes, that had 2 or more episodes per tape.

Ghosted by Ronnie @ 08/14/2007 10:43 AM EDT

Just renewed my cell phone contract with Sprint about two months ago. Been with them for about 5 yrs now. Called and told them I was thinking of switching to Verizon when my contract was up in April, at which point the rep transferred me to their ‘retentions’ department. See, Sprint has a group of people dedicated solely to keeping you with Sprint, and can off you deals not available to in-store, online, or through their regular reps.

Ended up getting a new plan for less money, but with more minutes, more texting, free web/data use, and two Motorola Q phones for about $10 each after rebates.

Ghosted by jokun @ 08/14/2007 10:55 AM EDT

And sorry, I know I should have proof-read, but I forgot. Typos galore!

Ghosted by jokun @ 08/14/2007 11:02 AM EDT

Finding a Fisher Price PXL 2000 camera at a Flea Market for $30, at the height of the PXL craze when they were going for about $2000 on Ebay.

Ghosted by Megan @ 08/14/2007 1:26 PM EDT

I am a hardcore bargin shopper, so I have been lucky enough to snag some really great deals. Some of which include:

– A mint in the box Michael Myers limited edition doll from Spencer Gifts. The guy at the flea market was asking $20, but I offered $15 and he took it. Cheap ones on Ebay go for about $40. :)

– A brand new in the box old time popcorn maker to go with my movie theater theme for $3!

- A mint condition Lion King 2 disk DVD for $5 that I sold for $30 on Ebay

- 2 Faces of Death VHS tapes for $1 each

- I was somehow able to find 4 copies of Madman, a long OOP slasher, in a few locations around me. I bought them all for $5 each, kept one and sold the rest for around $30 each.

- My copy of Dr. Giggles I found for $4.00 and with my discount, received for $2.50.

- 2 DVD copies of The Stand for $6.00 each, which I sold for around $40 each

- My happiest bargin yet: I just won Halloween: The Perfect Collection from Germany. It’s limited to 6,000 copies. I scored it for $31 American dollars!

Ghosted by DarkPumpkin @ 08/14/2007 2:19 PM EDT

I helped a friend move stuff around in her grandparents’ Auction Barn and when we were done, they told us to pick something and take it. I got a FREE self-contained record player that’s like a suitcase! STILL works like new!

I also went to a thrift store on a whim and found a virtually new pair of rollerskates (white with pink wheels and laces!) 3 bucks… thought they’ll never fit me… tried them on and fit like a dream!

Also got a RARE New Kids on the Block promo record from Europe with a mix of “The Right Stuff” I had never heard before for $5. It may not be worth that much, but to me, being a huge fan, it was the best ever!

Ghosted by Little Sara @ 08/14/2007 2:21 PM EDT

I think some of you are confused between DEALS and THEFT.

I bought a TigerDirect barebones kit for $20 a few years ago. Case, motherboard, power supply, cd rom drive, keyboard, mouse and speakers for 20 after rebate. Scored some deals on the rest of the hardware and built a decent pc for 300.

Ghosted by NateAss @ 08/14/2007 3:31 PM EDT

Magnavox Odyssey. In box. $2.

Ghosted by Trevor @ 08/14/2007 4:24 PM EDT

I got an original Asteroids Deluxe arcade cabinet for FREE. Our old neighbor was a 50 somthing year old super-genius inventor type who got it somewhere broken just so he could fix it up and play around with it. He played it too much, beat the game, and was sick of it, so he gave it to my brother and I (young teenagers at the time) for free.
This guy was awesome. When I was like 7 He built a go-kart out of mostly ply-wood and a lawn mower engine. He let my brother and I drive it almost every day! He liked us because he was divorced and only got to see his daughter on some weekends.

Ghosted by Murderface @ 08/15/2007 2:35 PM EDT

I paid $20 for a $120 Calphalon skillet.

…goodbye cheap nonstick.

Ghosted by TEd Sawchuck @ 08/15/2007 3:44 PM EDT

I just bought “Lying Liars” by Al Franken at Dollar Tree. Have also found gems in the Barnes and Noble bargian section. And Wal-Mart’s five dollar DVD is hot right now, got Road to Perdition, Escape from New York SE, The Doors SE, always worth a look when I go there

Ghosted by Zorak33 @ 08/15/2007 6:32 PM EDT

i finally have an awesome deal that i can talk about, so i am writing in the no longer currently current thread. i signed up for an amazon.com visa card which means that on your first purchase you get 30 dollars knocked off it. So I picked up the entire complete set of the office UK and then also the two disc special 20th anniversary edition of the transformers movie. I got all of this for 25 bucks, I felt like such a badass afterwards its ridiculous, and it’s not even that incredible of a deal. Not like 20 bucks for something that is 2000, but it did make me feel good when the next day I went to walmart and they only had the first series of the office uk for 28.

Ghosted by FOB danny @ 08/16/2007 2:05 AM EDT

Long-time lurker, first time posting here.

I scored a Sega Dreamcast w/ 2 controllers, 1 VMU and several games I found on Ebay. I think I paid around $40 including shipping.

I’m always looking around the local flea markets and antique stores, hoping to find something interesting or valuable. One day I found a Commodore Magic Voice Speech Module for $2. Knowing how crazy some people are about retro gaming, I checked out Ebay, and found them going for 30-40 dollars.

I found a copy of Beyond Good and Evil for the Gamecube for $15 on Amazon, when they cheapest I could find them for was $30 and up.

Yesterday I ordered a Spyderco Navigator 2 for 31.96 from Sierra Trading Post. That was a savings of 67%.

Ghosted by Chris M @ 08/16/2007 7:12 PM EDT

Over the past year, I had been wanting to collect GI JOES…the best ones I had when I was younger got stolen from me and the ones I did have I gave to my friend in high school assuming there would be a Battle Beast trade.

But at the beginning of June, I went to my friends store and he had a bag of GI JOES for 5$. Of course, it was parts and I would need O-rings to assemble them and a few would need new parts.

But it had Gyro viper…Secto Viper and so forth.

Ghosted by Aoecean @ 08/16/2007 10:09 PM EDT

My work was having an “employee” clearence sale on humidifiers, I got one that goes retail for $189 for 15 bucks. I don’t even know if I’ll end up using it, but who could pass up that deal?

Ghosted by sugar @ 08/17/2007 9:25 AM EDT

There is a local Amish auction near my home where you can hap-hazardly dump all the crap you no longer want. When the outdoor part is through, anything left on the grounds is free to all us scavengers.
One day, I saw this big ol’ brown ceramic plate. I thought it would look nice on the kitchen table. I put it in my car and it says “Tiffany & Co.” on the back.
After some research, I find that this plate was part of a line of dinnerware that was recalled & destroyed due to possible lead paint contamination. There aren’t many out there that haven’t been smashed & replaced.
Long story short: I’ll not be returning it to Tiffany’s. I’m gonna keep it (& not eat off of it) until it’s worth beaucoup dollars.

Ghosted by AspireTilDeath @ 08/17/2007 9:58 AM EDT

Around X-mas about 8 years ago, I went to an old True Value hardware store looking for a X-mas tree stand and as I passed through one of the aisles, I noticed the familiar look of carded Star Wars figures out of the corner of my eye. I stopped and sure enough, there were 10 carded Kenner Empire Strikes Back figures hanging on a peg rack like it was 1980. I couldn’t believe it! I actually started shaking a little. I pulled the first off the shelf and the little red price sticker read $1.18. Also lying on the bottom shelf was an unopened Dagobah playset — with a $3.00 tag. I grabbed them all, paid for them (it was under $20 with tax). I put the toys in my car and proceeded to serach every inch of that store for more old toys and junk. The old guy working there asked if I was looking for more Star Wars stuff, I said “hells yes!” and he informed me that what I bought was all of it. It had actually only been on the shelf for a few weeks as he had found the stuff when they renovated a storage room. He figured no one would want to buy toys that were 20 years old, so he marked them way down.
It was unreal.
Also, a co-worker of mine went to a locally-owned grocery store several years back when they were going out of business and selling their shelves and fixtures and stuff. He went in and there was a floding table with a stack of Star Wars 12-backs, about seven or eight of them. He paid .25 a piece for them. He displayed them in his tv room for a while but finally sold them for lots of money. His deal is better than mine.

Ghosted by JoeMike @ 08/17/2007 4:56 PM EDT

I bought a blanket in fairly good condition at a yard sale for 20 cents. That blanket lasted me nearly 8 years. It sounds pretty lame, I know. Especially compared to JoeMike’s friend’s deal.

Ghosted by Sabi @ 08/18/2007 4:00 PM EDT

I was at an auction where the attendance was sucky, and ended up getting brocade jewelry box full of vintage costume jewelry, silver jewelry, and yes, antique gold jewelry for all of $5!

Did I mention I’m hooked on auctions now?

Ghosted by Poseid @ 08/20/2007 4:33 PM EDT

A month before Mother’s Day, my company picked up an association of jewelers as a client. What’s better than a diamond necklace for the wife on Mother’s Day? A diamond necklace you picked up for 70% off. 70 motherfuckin %!.

Ghosted by Chris @ 08/21/2007 3:33 PM EDT

When I was a kid back in the late 70’s there was a great toy store called Toy City, since it was a few miles away and we didn’t have much money growing up, we rarely went there. I was really into building models and they had a huge aisle of them so I saved all my lawn mowing money and planned a bike trip there.

When I arrived the store was in disarray with stuff sitting out in the aisles, I figured they were just rearranging it so I started digging through the model kits. What I didn’t know was that the store was going out of business and I’d arrived on, or nearly on, the last day.

A manager came over and asked me to take as many models as I wanted for 25 cents each, I think I had around 7 to 10 bucks on me which was about 40 model kits!

They brought out those HUGE plastic sacks and filled them up but I had so much there was no way I was going to ride my bike home. Since my parents didn’t know what I was up to, I had to walk the whole way with bags of models hanging off the handlebars, sissy bar, and seat of my bike.

At that point in my life, it was the best deal ever.

Ghosted by Mikey D @ 08/21/2007 10:58 PM EDT

Went to a “flea market” that consisted of a small storage building full of crap run by a morbidly obese fellow with an aversion to wearing shirts, and scored a 2600 and about 40 games, including a blue label Demon Attack cart, for $9.

Best garage sale score was a Sony portable reel-to-reel recorder, Polaroid Pro Pack camera with half a pack of film still in, and a decent super 8 camera for a grand total of $15.

Ghosted by BillJax @ 08/23/2007 12:21 PM EDT

Back when I worked @ Electronics Boutique, I made mention to customers, in passing, that I enjoyed playing Magic: The Gathering. A customer came in one day and made mention that he was looking to dump a few cards he had collected over the years. I wasn’t one to pass up adding to my collection, so I asked him to bring them in.

As I perused the batch of mostly revised and earlier cards (read: older) I noticed a couple cards of the name “Sinkhole”. Rare cards, indeed. At that time, they sold for ~30$ per. The kicker, however was nearing the end. With around 15 cards to go, I found a Mox Sapphire. O.o At that time, a mox sapphire was selling for ~$200, so I asked the guy how much he wanted for the set, all the while attempting the best poker face I could muster.

Ten Bucks.

I jumped at the chance.

Some of you may give me hell for taking advantage of the situation, but of a seller does not do his homework, that isn’t my fault!

BTW, in a turn of profit, I sold the 2 sinkholes to my co-worker for $40, so I REALLY made out like a bandit that day :D

Ghosted by Lawndart @ 08/23/2007 2:04 PM EDT

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