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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 on 08/11/2007. E-mail me!



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!”

Chestnuts roasted by spaz307 @ 08/13/2007 1:12 AM

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!

Chestnuts roasted by Kamuke @ 08/13/2007 3:48 AM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by dohopoki @ 08/13/2007 5:45 AM

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!

Chestnuts roasted by doubleofive @ 08/13/2007 8:58 AM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 9:21 AM

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

Chestnuts roasted by dohopoki @ 08/13/2007 9:50 AM

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

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 08/13/2007 11:01 AM

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

Chestnuts roasted by Knegative @ 08/13/2007 11:17 AM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Knegative @ 08/13/2007 11:47 AM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Melissa Y. @ 08/13/2007 12:41 PM

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!

Chestnuts roasted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 12:47 PM

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!

Chestnuts roasted by kingklash @ 08/13/2007 1:11 PM

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)

Chestnuts roasted by worldofbong @ 08/13/2007 4:13 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 4:25 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Muppet Baby @ 08/13/2007 4:27 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Char Aznable @ 08/13/2007 4:50 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Justin B @ 08/13/2007 4:51 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Justin B @ 08/13/2007 4:58 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 4:59 PM

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…

Chestnuts roasted by tanta07 @ 08/13/2007 5:22 PM

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! :)

Chestnuts roasted by Chris @ 08/13/2007 6:01 PM

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!

Chestnuts roasted by Cricket @ 08/13/2007 6:26 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by squee4242 @ 08/13/2007 6:50 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by hope @ 08/13/2007 9:09 PM

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.

Chestnuts roasted by Wukong @ 08/13/2007 9:44 PM

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