Why Buy Used? A Guide to Thrift Store Shopping

I used to avoid thrift stores before I became a vintage dealer. I understand for some folks there's a certain distaste factor involved in used stuff - I definitely felt uncomfortable at first. You eventually get used to the atmosphere so that’s less of an issue for me now. It can also be intimidating to see piles of stuff and try to figure out whether there’s a quality item somewhere in the clutter.

I visit thrift stores several times a month now. I realize some of them have a controversial reputation as a charity (Goodwill specifically). But if even some of my money is going to help people, I consider that a win over buying at Walmart and Amazon. Plus you are giving something new life instead of sending it to a landfill. It doesn’t matter which thrift store you buy from, all of them are saving usable products from the dump.

That said, here are some tips to help deal with the thrift shopping experience:

1. Take a buddy - it’s more pleasant to go with someone else. You get two sets of eyes scoping the shelves and you have a comfort buddy.


2. Understand that anything you buy needs to be cleaned. Run it through the dishwasher or saturate it with cleaner and rinse. I consider 5-10 minutes of elbow grease to be part of the trade-off for getting a deal on price.


3. Carefully inspect everything and make sure there’s no damage you can’t live with. It’s amazing how often I spot an issue after I get home.


4. Keep hand sanitizer or wet wipes in the car for use after you leave the store. You’ll feel better once you’re clean again!


5. Try to be patient. For whatever reason a lot of (slow) older folks tend to thrift shop. I usually skip past to dodge them and circle back when the row is clear.


6. When in doubt on something, don’t buy. Stick with what you know. Or if you decide to get it, realize you’re taking a chance and only spend what you’re willing to risk/gamble. 

I feel like thrifting is a worthwhile option for anyone, regardless of income level. Sometimes you find older decor items that just aren’t made anymore which bring funky personality to a man cave, etc. If you have kids it can be a godsend for keeping up with growth spurts without spending a ton on new clothes every year. I also think young adults who are getting their own apartment should definitely check out thrift stores for cheap dishes and furniture. If you haven't gone to a thrift store, try it from time to time. You might get converted to the idea just like me!

Review: Jim Beam Bourbon Whiskey - Full, Unopened Vintage Bottle of 59 Year Old Liquor!

This week I went to an estate sale and found myself in the basement. At the far end was a small room lined with shelves that had its own door, I suspect it was intended as a root cellar. The owner had mostly stored opened paint cans and miscellaneous tools in there. Barely visible was a dusty cardboard box with some writing on it. I pulled it out and it was a Jim Beam decanter in a plain white box. As I turned it around to read what was stamped on it, I could feel it sloshing around. It still had liquor inside!

At this point I was pretty excited. In 4+ years of vintage picking I hadn't come across any old decanters with actual booze in them. Once we were home I did some research on old bottles of Jim Beam. There were plenty of people theorizing that it would be bad in some way. I read one article that proclaimed it would not keep aging in the decanter because bottling halts the aging process. I didn't feel very confident about any of these opinions because very few of them were from people who had actually opened an old bottle and tasted it.

After all that reading I was committed to opening the bottle. I had confirmed that there probably wasn't a huge windfall coming my way if I sold it, plus I'm pretty sure eBay won't let you sell without a liquor license. The main pitfall seemed to be checking the cork to make sure it still had a good seal. On inspection I could see that the old tax strip had not been broken, so it had not been opened and resealed. So far so good!

My husband tried to uncork the bottle but it was sealed in pretty tight. It had a ceramic stopper and we assumed it was cork in the bottle. We were in luck again because it turned out to be a cork with a plastic coating over it, so the cork itself had not been exposed to the liquor or the elements over the years. We both sniffed and didn't pick up anything off about it. My husband wiped down the lip just in case there was dust or gunk on it. Then we poured it out of the decanter and into an empty bottle.

We poured a shot glass and both took tentative sips. It didn't taste weird in any way. Unfortunately we're not bourbon drinkers so we probably aren't a good judge of how well it held up. Personally I felt a head-to-head taste test was in order....

So a day later we went to our local liquor store to get a bottle of Beam bourbon that had been aged 9 years like our vintage bottle. Unfortunately none of the current Beam offerings are aged 9 years, the closest we could find was Jim Beam Black. The bottle of Black simply said "extra aged" although some searches online turned up the tidbit that a few years ago it was aged 8 years (later dropped from the label, no official word if the aging was also changed).

We poured out two shot glasses of bourbon -- one aged 9 years plus 49 in the package and the other aged a theoretical 8 years. We sniffed both and right away could tell a difference between the two. The older Beam had a prominent Rum-like smell and the new Beam had a mild alcohol smell with a hint of buttery or sweetness to it.

Next we tasted each, just a small sip held in our mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. The old Beam had a strong flavor that reminded me quite a bit of Rum. Holding it on your tongue had a distinct fire to it and when swallowed it had a potent alcohol bite. The new Beam had almost no flavor other than a slight medicinal quality in the mouth. New Beam had a milder bite to it going down as well. I'm not a drinker so my take is purely based on the inexperienced impressions of someone who doesn't drink (like at all).

However my husband does drink Vodka and craft beer on a regular basis. His impressions were pretty similar to mine. We both agreed that the old Beam had a very Rum-like quality to it. He said if he continued to drink the new Beam he would use it only as a mixer but he would consider drinking the old Beam on its own over ice.

If you come across an old bottle of liquor, don't be afraid to open it. It may taste better than the new stuff!
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Antique Dealer Prices, Discounts and Haggling aka How to Make an Offer

My dad is an avid Lionel train collector and a while back he asked me about haggling. As a vintage dealer I'm generally on the other side of that process. There are plenty of shoppers who don't want to engage in bargaining. But if you are walking away from an item at the listed price, it obviously doesn't hurt to make an offer and see if the seller takes you up on it. Sometimes they're happy to make a sale and willing to drop the price to get it.

First, lets understand where the seller is coming from. We spend a lot of time finding items for our shop. Personally I'm on the prowl 2-3 hours every day. I hit thrift stores, I check estate sale listings and online auctions. Once I bring something home I shoot professional quality photos, write captivating copy and create the online listing. If cleaning or repairs are needed I do that too. After the purchase I carefully wrap, box and ship it out. So even a cheap $5 item has at least 20 minutes of my sweat equity in it. This is good to keep in mind when you evaluate a haggle, it's not fair to ask me to earn less than minimum wage for my time. It may help to realize that paying me for my time has saved you 2-3 hours of your time hunting down this same item in your local thrift shops.

LUCK = I went to an auction or estate sale and the prices just happened to be cheap that day and other bidders/buyers didn’t swoop in and nab the cheap stuff before I did.

There are times when dealers get stuff in “box lots” which means we bought a box of random stuff. In that situation our cost might be low for each item in the box. If someone comes to my store wanting to haggle I have more wiggle room on those items. If you know a seller who regularly offers low priced wares, this is likely the reason. I find that silver, brass and copper most frequently gets sold in bundles like this so if you want to haggle with a seller these may be good items to target.

Another way to get the dealmaking ball rolling is to buy more than one item. If you're willing to buy multiple items in their shop, you can use a bundling tactic to get a discount. The more items you combine in your order the more likely you'll pick at least one that has wiggle room on it. This increases the likelihood that your dealer will work with you on a bundle price. You also save money on shipping!

Fire Sale!
Another way to find discounts on vintage wares is when a dealer is going out of business and they need to get rid of everything. This happens a lot more than you’d think because the antiques business is not strong right now. Some dealers are just collectors who “store” their collection in an antique mall and at some point they decide to bail out. Or a dealer has passed away and the family is liquidating their stuff and likely don’t even know the value of it. The best place to find "fire sale" deals is in an antique mall. They have several hundred dealers under one roof and there's always at least 2-3 doing a sale ranging from 20% to 50% off. The higher the discount, the more likely it's a true liquidation. Finally if there's an item you've had your eye on for a while and it's still in the store 6+ months later, the dealer may be open to bargaining. No dealer wants to have an item sit around too long, they want to make some profit and put that money into a new product. Try making an offer!

Making the Offer

Ok so you've found an item you like and you want to try haggling. Obviously you want as good a deal as you can get but not be so low the seller is offended. I can tell you right now that 50% is too low. That's not to say you'll never get a taker, I suppose 1% of the time that might work. But the other 99 times you'll piss off the seller and they may stop talking to you. Most dealers don't have such amazing margins that they can give a 50% discount and still make a decent profit. Thanks to eBay the vintage market is pretty competitive and bloated margins are a thing of the past. A good place to start is 30% because it's low enough that you're getting a nice, beefy discount but not so low that the dealer feels like you have no respect for their time and effort. Understand that they probably won't agree to this but they shouldn't be offended either. They may counter with 10% and you can counter with 20%. At this point they will either take the 20% if they have wiggle room or counter with 15%. If they don't take 20% you can rest assured they probably can't go that low. Most dealers would like to reach terms quickly and not risk you walking away, so they will take the 20% if they are able.

Advanced Haggling

If you really want to up your game, a more advanced tactic is to do some market research. Check Etsy and eBay and come up with an average price for the item you want. Etsy prices are often higher than eBay because there's no bidding war for the buyer. If you're talking to an Etsy seller, it's fair to use their Etsy competitors as a benchmark. Try to find at least 5 competing items and figure out the average price, then use that to help with negotiations. Bear in mind that your comparison items should be the same size/condition. It's not fair to compare a chippy Pyrex bowl to an intact one. A side benefit of seeking out competitors is you might actually find a better deal!

Be careful not to come off pompous with this approach because you're essentially telling the seller they mispriced their item. Be willing to share links to the other products if they ask so they can see for themselves. Some sellers don't do market research when they come up with pricing, so they may not realize they are off target. If you're haggling in person you can use your phone to show them. This strategy might not work if they are stuck on their price, but it's may work where other options fail.

Good luck!


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In the Eye of the Beholder

In the picking world we see a lot of people's stuff. A LOT. I've only been doing this for a few years but I'll try to lay down an estimate of how many items I see on a regular basis. One of my haunts is ShopGoodwill. This is where I first started picking and where I did a lot of my brain training.

Every weekday my local Goodwill posts a minimum of 400 new items. And I look at Every. Single. One. Let's do some math here... 400 items a day @ 5 days a week is 2000 items a week or 8000 items a month.

This does not include all the items I see at thrift stores or estate sales. Suffice it to say I see at least 10,000 items a month. You can see how after 6-12 months it would be fairly easy to identify the common from the unusual.

Each time I spot something new, I go to eBay and see what people are asking for it. In the early days I spent hours doing this, looking up items every few minutes. Now I look up mystery items maybe once or twice a day. After a year or two you develop an instinctive radar for the odd man out.

This is an important part of picking. You can't always buy the stuff you know. You have to be looking for new trends and new categories to branch into, otherwise you risk stagnation. So it's helpful to have "oddball" radar. Often I'm attracted to an odd item just because I want to learn more about it. For a lot of pickers this is part of the excitement -- finding a weird object and figuring out what it is.

The great part about this business is that everyone's radar is different and often tickled by different things. I don't have the same mental catalog that the next guy does. Some things slip by my radar and other things slip by theirs. This is what makes an estate auction exciting... in real time you find out how committed the other bidders are to an item you want.

And sometimes you get a great item for cheap. In short, it slipped through everyone else's radar. Or the right bidders just weren't participating that day. Which is how I ended up with this:

Clearly most of the buyers looked at this and saw a kinda ugly pottery item. I had never seen one of these before but I know from my Etsy store that people like figural planters and sometimes they're attracted to ugly. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

No one else would bid on it -- so I did. I bid $5. No one else even countered. I figured at that price surely I could make a modest profit on it.

Once I got it home I started researching. The only similar objects I could find were very old. Like 1800's old. And I was seeing some really high prices for those things. After running the info past hubby, we agreed that we needed an expert opinion. For $10 you can submit photos to ValueMyStuff.com and a pro will give you an appraisal. We decided to splurge and get one.

Our appraisal came back with the assessment that this is an 1870s era majolica item, likely made by Minton. Minton is probably the most collectible maker of majolica from this time period. Even with an old repaired leg, they gave this piece a $1000 insurance value.

Now obviously we didn't sell it for that! The retail value is closer to $500 and even that depends on how determined buyers are to have it. Given our low cost, we opted to go for the quick sale and post it for $299. After a couple of price tweaks we eventually got $275.

Lest you think that picking is all about big profit, I keep a silver bowl in my house as a humble reminder of bad radar. From the photos I was pretty sure it was an antique silver bowl. Unfortunately when I got it home there was a sticker underneath for Target, dated 2003. I keep it just to make sure I don't get cocky :)

Shabby Chic Polishing Technique for Vintage Silver

Vintage silver is a tricky beast for sellers. Some folks like their silver to have that aged look, others want it shiny like the day it left the factory. When you find a nice silver piece in the wild... it doesn't always look so nice. It might have spotty or weird looking tarnish. I've come up with a way of dealing with this dilemma that hopefully satisfies both camps.

I call it "shabby chic polishing"...

So here's an item we got in a box lot from Goodwill. It's a creamer made by Wallace in their popular "Baroque" pattern with pretty heavy tarnish.

This is a bit too dark to qualify for tastefully aged, so I'm going to give it my shabby chic treatment. The key to this strategy is to polish only the smooth surfaces. We're going to leave the fancy scrolled areas alone. This way I can bring out the shine but still leave some character.

Here's a photo of the same creamer with silver polish on it. You don't have to let it dry like I did, that just made the polish easier to see in the photo. Essentially you want to clean the white areas with your silver polish. Try to avoid buffing the areas with no polish - although you'll probably cross into them a bit. It's not important to be precise here, so don't fret if that happens.

Once it's clean your creamer should look like this one. You can see in this photo that the center section is much lighter while the handle/feet/rim are still dark. Now it still has some of that aged character that some vintage buyers like while still looking "clean" to the other buyers.

Here's a final photo for the actual listing which shows you how shiny and reflective the cleaned surfaces are now. It's basically a mirror, which is why the photos are taken outside instead of in a messy office!

I use Wright's Silver Cream for heavy tarnish situations, we also have Weiman's Silver Polish for light duty work. When polishing you need to wash and towel dry afterwards. Washing removes polish residue (that white stuff) and if you don't towel dry you'll leave water spots that over time turn into more ugly spotty tarnish. Also please don't use the aluminum foil dip method to clean silver, it can cause permanent damage.

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What's It Worth? Using eBay to Price / Value Your Vintage Finds!

I just recently created an infographic for a process I use a lot. When you sell vintage items, you need to figure out what price to put on them. Sometimes you can search on Google and see what other people are charging. Other times there just aren't similar items out there to find. I had this problem a lot when I first started.

Eventually I figured out how to get some of this information from eBay. Here's the graphic I created that shows how to do this:

Step One: type in your search and hit the "Search" button. Step Two: Click "Sold Listings" on the bottom left menu. The page will reload and eBay will show you sold listings instead of current listings. You can get a pretty good idea of what people are willing to pay based on these sales.

So what can you do if there are no matches in current or sold listings? Well you can try searching for a more generic version of the item you want to sell. That's not always a good option. In this situation, comparing to other Pyrex patterns wouldn't be useful information.

When I strike out on eBay I turn to Worthpoint. This is a paid service so it's probably not worthwhile for the casual eBay seller. The cost is about $20 a month. In return you get access to several years worth of price information from eBay and other online auction sites. You can find most products in their database of 300 million records.

The final option if neither of these work for you, go with your gut. What would you pay for this piece if you wanted one for yourself? Ask a few friends what they would pay if you like and form a consensus. In my family we tend to be pretty frugal. I figure if I'm willing to pay $50 for something, odds are pretty good that other shoppers would too!

Just be forewarned - if you are an avid collector your opinion probably isn't terribly valid. Collectors have a tendency to significantly overvalue their collection based on what they paid, not on what the current market will bear.

Will The Real J.C. Moore Please Stand Up?

A couple of years ago my husband and I acquired an unusual copper / sugar creamer set. They were large and had oversized wooden handles. They were marked "JC Moore 837" on the bottom. Here's what they look like:

When we researched them online, we kept seeing other people selling them for very high prices and saying they were related to Tiffany & Co. However, we could never find a source that substantiated that connection, just a lot of people making the claim. It's understandable how folks might draw such a conclusion, as there are two different men named John C. Moore who have worked at Tiffany.

In the mid to late 1800s, Tiffany commissioned work from a prominent NY silversmith, John C. Moore, and later acquired his operation. He went on to win numerous prestigious design awards for them. In 1907, his great grandson, also named John C. Moore, became the President of Tiffany.

We weren't too comfortable with the cloud of confusion around this, so my husband sent an email to a Tiffany expert. Her name is Wendy Yothers, and she had worked as a conservator for Tiffany. She was kind enough to reply, and here is what she had to say about the pictures we sent her:

The pieces you pictured are definitely not Tiffany, and were not made by either John C. Moore or his grandson. The craftsmanship is not of their calibre, and the style is inconsistent with either of their time frames.

That felt pretty conclusive to us, so we didn't use any information about Tiffany to sell them. We put them out at our local antique mall for a modest price, where they sold fairly quickly. Recently, I spotted another set at my local Goodwill and snapped them up. Now I was back to the missing history of these items and the need to figure out who made them.

Once again, the number of places that still attribute these to Tiffany is pretty overwhelming. The vast majority of the references either say nothing at all or they mention the Tiffany connection, which turns our mission into a "needle in a haystack" operation. Luckily I've picked up a few research tricks since I last had this item on my plate.

One of the best sources for concrete information about brands and companies is Google Books. You can plug names into a search of their archive and get results from old magazine ads, business directories, and more. I have used this many times to create a rough timeline for an old business. It's not perfect, but it can turn up information that's not floating around the normal collector's circles. It's also handy for brands that don't have a big enough following to generate a collecting site.

It took some tweaking of the search terms, but my husband finally got one hit with Google Books. It's just a snippet from an old Cattleman's catalog from 1953:

We felt strongly that this was referring to our sugar and creamer. They have carved wood handles with a flame-like shape. Unfortunately, Google won't let us read anything beyond the snippet view. My husband managed to abuse the snippet system to force more of the text out and finally pieced together the whole ad:

Magnificent coffee urn in heavy copper that holds two full gallons of coffee. Made by J. C. Moore, California coppersmith, it features his trademark in the hand-carved oak flame top and handle. It's mounted on legs of brass and chained to tilt for easy pouring. Lined in silver, it heats by Sterno. A truly handsome piece.

"The Cattleman" is still being published today, as it has been since 1916. My husband decided to contact the publication directly to see if we could get a copy of this elusive page from their archives. They were kind enough to send us a PDF of the page and didn't even charge us a fee for it (thank you!). Here is the actual ad:

You can see that the shape and the handles of this urn match our sugar/creamer set. I'm pretty confident that this photo proves that the "JC Moore 837 copper" wares are from California, not New York or Tiffany, and were made in the mid 20th century.

My husband and I are hoping that by sharing this information, we can dispel the misinformation out there about these items. Even if sellers continue to include the Tiffany reference, hopefully buyers who do their due diligence will be able to avoid making a costly mistake. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of folks out there who are paying premium prices for these pieces, believing they are made by an iconic Tiffany designer.