8 ms·

The early 2000s were kind of a magical time for a young geek because Goodwill was still taking computers, and you could get fully kitted out for a Linux machine

by floren 5y ago

The early 2000s were kind of a magical time for a young geek because Goodwill was still taking computers, and you could get fully kitted out for a Linux machine for about $50. Over the course of a few trips I picked up a 486, a monitor, keyboard, mouse, an external modem, speakers, a compatible sound-card, and so on. If I'd have been smarter, I could have snagged quite a few old Macs which are now hot commodities. They seem to focus a lot more on clothes these days, and I can sympathize because people need decent clothes a lot better than I need computers and weird gadgets, but it makes going into the store less interesting. I think part of the problem is that anything actually neat or possibly valuable goes up on their website rather than the store shelves.

sjg007 5y ago
Bulk clothes that don't sell get turned into rags.
- grecy 5y ago
  In my experience, they wind up for sale in street markets all across Africa for extremely low prices. In 35 countries I saw American clothes in HUGE piles for sale.. many still had the goodwill tag (or other donation brands) still attached. I bought plenty of shorts and t-shirts from these vendors :)
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    Oh yeah, mitumba, something that has thoroughly wrecked African textile industries - hard to compete with "almost free" Ironically, "fast fashion" may finally bring an end to this, since this low quality stuff in donated (and thus almost destroyed) form isn't worth being shipped over to Africa, whereas "fresh" FF clothing from Asia is as cheap as mitumba was before.
  - nitwit005 5y ago
    I'd assume much of that was new, as cloths regularly fail to sell.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      I know some of it is preemptively-prepared clothing for things that don’t happen, like commemorating championship wins of teams that end up losing. The stuff for the finalists is ready to sell for the day the winner is decided, the actual winners stuff is sold and the rest is dumped overseas.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        > the rest is dumped overseas. Or worse, shredded outright. In Germany alone, 230 million pieces of clothing (or 10% of the year's offering) are shredded without ever being worn (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-Hunderte-Millionen-Textilien-fabrikneu-vernichtet.html https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-H...).
    - grecy 5y ago
      Based on the condition, at least 99% of it was used, heavily.
- URSpider94 5y ago
  One of my favorite used clothing stores is The Garment District in Cambridge, MA. It’s actually an outgrowth of a recycled fiber company that makes janitorial wiping cloths. The good stuff goes to the vintage clothing store upstairs, the somewhat-junky stuff goes to the “dollar-a-pound” floor downstairs, the leftovers get made into rags.
andrew_ 5y ago
Along with Salvation Army, they've increased their prices to the point where it's no longer worth buying from them versus surfing eBay or OfferUp for a good deal on stuff in considerably better shape. I too remember the late 90s and early 00s fondly at the thrift shop. My childhood stereo systems were exclusively found items at Salvation Army (on Grand River, which had the biggest stereo selection) and my first few modems came from SA. It's something I don't think today's youth have available.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Printed t-shirts at my local Goodwill are more expensive than brand new ones at Wal-Mart a few blocks away. Goodwill seems like it's only a good deal if you're buying whatever higher end stuff they happen to have.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  My home theater system has a $20 thrift store stereo coupled with $20 thrift store speakers. It's equipment that would have cost maybe $500 new. I also pickup up monitors, keyboards, mice, cables, and power strips there. Mostly what I get there are books. I like books, and it's a cheap hobby when you get 'em from the thrift store. From the pawn shop I get laptops and webcams. Also lots of tools. I put together a toolkit for my car this way - cheap tools aren't a theft target.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Is there a Goodwill-type organization that focuses on electronics that I can donate to? These days you need a phone or computer just to apply for a job, let alone function in society.
- fy20 5y ago
  it's more work, but pretty much any old laptop or phone you can sell on eBay. You can donate the proceeds if you wish.
- kazoomonger 5y ago
  This exists locally to me, you might have something similar near you: https://www.freegeektwincities.org/ https://www.freegeektwincities.org/ They've been great for both buying and selling. They take old cables that don't even work any more and recycle them for scrap.
- Fogest 5y ago
  I see a lot of people give these kinds of things out via online marketplaces either for free or for cheap prices now. In Ontario it seems like the popular sites for this are Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  pretty sure you can go on craigslist and get nearly free stuff if you are in desperate need of a computer or phone. Let's look at phoenix craigslist. * Here's a guy who looks like he stole a truck carrying Dell Optiplexes, buried them in his backyard, and has now dug them up to sell for $40 each. He's got 50 of them! https://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/sys/d/laveen-dell-optiplex-755-sff-pc/7293690577.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/sys/d/laveen-dell-optiple... * Here's a Dell Inspiron for $35 ($20 without charger) https://tucson.craigslist.org/sys/d/tucson-dell-inspiron-1464-laptop/7315733710.html https://tucson.craigslist.org/sys/d/tucson-dell-inspiron-146... * Here's a Lenovo xc10 laptop for $95. Not a bad deal. https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-lenovo-x130e-laptop/7315196222.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-lenov... * Dell Latitude for $90 https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-dell-latitude-e4300-laptop/7307065954.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-dell-... Bottom line, if you are willing to use an old computer, you can get one for less than the price of dinner for two at Applebee's.
asdff 5y ago
The goodwill situation today for niche electronics is actually better than it was back then, thanks to the auction site imo.
- serf 5y ago
  the volume/variety may have increased, but the value-finds have gotten much worse. As a kid I used to frequent the Goodwill Electronics Waste store in Santa Ana, you could kit entire machines together for just a few twenties; the value of the parts compared to their once retail price was maybe 5 or 10 % of the MSRP even back then. I went back two years ago to satisfy my nostalgia and found the place now filled with 3-4 year old product that hovered around the cost to buy the same parts on an online vendor of some sort, and any of the interestingly-old-but-useless equipment like old ISA video cards/early PCI stuff/AT keyboards/anything beige was marked up so huge by some staffer that mistook vintage for value that it was absolutely impossible to find anything worth buying. Water damaged gameboy faded-grey cartridge? 200 dollars. Pentium 3 e-Machine? 300 dollars. 480 line composite security camera with no power supply and no hope that it will ever do anything useful ever again in the future? Does it have a beige or metal casing? 200 dollars. I think I ended up finding some cheap molex-style 12v fan to buy for a few bucks (more than any online retailer, still), but it was mostly just a guilt purchase to help support the Goodwill. I left incredibly disappointed.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    There was a golden era around the 2000s where Goodwill was amazing for deals - then someone wised up on values of some items and they just went nuts on pricing, especially anything that looks "high tech" - I suspect overpricing computers and not selling ANY of them is why the Goodwills won't take any computers anymore.
  - troupe 5y ago
    So are the prices adjusting to the market? I'd assume the price would get marked down eventually to the point where they can move stuff to make way for other things that come in. While their cost basis is low, they still have to move inventory to be sustainable. I just wonder if maybe there are a bunch of people out there willing to pay those prices for some reason.
II2II 5y ago
I also miss those magical times. Part of the magic was haggling over prices since nobody actually knew if the electronics would work, or simply because you carted off several boxes of stuff they couldn't sell. I managed to explore a number of 8 and 16-bit platforms from the 1980's and early 1990's because of that. Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken. They knew a lot of people were looking for cheap stuff they could fix, either for personal pleasure or to make a few dollars.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken. I suspect that thet haven’t gotten any less tolerant, just what people are willing to buy from them at a cost that covers justifies the inventory space given competition for the space has changed.
  - j4yav 5y ago
    Isn’t it the lack of space/economics that is making them less tolerant of keeping junk around? Or do you mean something else?
    - II2II 5y ago
      There was some concern about liability. One of the shops I frequented in the late 1990's would only let customers who they trusted browse through their sorted junk piles. These piles contained things like bicycles, which had to be thoroughly inspected and properly repaired in order to be safe. I also noticed a transition towards boutique style stores around that time. While the older stores may sell a box of books or bag of clothes for a few dollars, the newer stores would only sell items at their sticker price (or with a fixed discount during sales). Less product moved since people would only buy something when they felt it was worth the sticker price, rather than paying what they felt something was worth. The transition made space/economics more of a factor than it used to be. Some of the old style stores still exist, but they are increasingly difficult to find.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
It was local to the area, of course, but in that time too, but the Boeing Surplus Store was a magical place for me as a young tinkerer. I probably have a box or two of random interesting looking electronics I bought floating around with the hope to figure out how to make it blink again. Not to mention one of my first PCs being some random office worker's PC that had been upgraded. I'm still bummed they closed it down.
- tomcam 5y ago
  That place was magical. Sheets of titanium, amazing industrial-strength steel scissors for a dollar, military steel desks, all encircled by those amazing paintings of airplane prototypes.
- hadlock 5y ago
  Boeing Surplus Store felt like.... wandering into Doctor Who's garage. Yeah we came home with some plate titanium, giant sheets of memory foam that got repurposed on our boat, we bought a trailer designed to haul bar steel, then converted it into a canoe trailer for the local boy scout troop, my dad would buy brass bar stock and turn it into POG slammers on his metal lathe that he also got at Boeing Surplus. Just acres and acres of weird cool stuff.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I remember trying to pick up a piece of stainless steel "pipe" there. The piece was about 18" in diameter, maybe 24-36" long. The "pipe walls" were nearly 2" thick. At the time, I could lift one end of an upright piano in the sense of getting both wheels off the floor. I had never experienced the sense of utter futility before trying to lift that pipe. The complete and overwhelming sense that I would never be able to make it move even 1mm off the floor.
  - VLM 5y ago
    V = pi r squared times height so figure about 3 times 18 squared times 36 thats about 35K cubic inches if solid, or 2 inch thick walls means subtract 3 times 14 squared times 35 thats about 21K cubic inches. So a good 14K cubic inches of stainless. Engineering rule of thumb to one sig fig (I mean we are assuming pi=3) is stainless is about a quarter of a pound per cu inch, so that pipe weighed about 3500 pounds. A good engineer should be able to do all this in his head; to one sig fig that pipe weighed about as much as a lightweight F-150 pickup truck (not the extended bed super crew cab LOL thats probably 5000 pounds) World record squat lift was 1036 pounds as I recall. LOL No not my record, my heaviest set on Friday was 480 and 8 reps.
wheybags 5y ago
I dunno, LGR on youtube seems to find a lot of cool retro tech there[1]. A lot of crap too though. Not American, so I can't comment personally. 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofBZmDBuqNPnCdt https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofB...
- yaml-ops-guy 5y ago
  Love the coincidence of laying on my couch watching LGR on a Friday night at the very moment that I find a comment on HN talking about LGR.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  He does, but you have to remember that each 15 minute episode is recorded over a period of months (like 4-6 months) of him visiting several stores weekly. So it's not like you'll find anything interesting every time you go. I'm lucky to live in Japan where we have a junk store called "hard off" that focuses on hardware. They always have some obscure interesting stuff, tons of Laserdisc players, VHD, HD-VHS, Famicom floppy drives, etc. https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/albums/72157719132609607 https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/albums/72157719132609...
  - xkeysc0re 5y ago
    Wow what a store. My bank account is thankful there's nothing like that near me
  - timr 5y ago
    Hard off is really good, and there's nothing comparable in the US. You can pretty much get every recent model of cellphone, iPad, Mac, etc. in like-new condition, at a fraction of the price of new. The stuff in this photo album is the "junk" section at the back of the store, and it's still way better than what you'd find at vintage store in the US. In general, vintage stores in Japan are amazing. I don't know how they manage to find such a huge quantity of like-new stuff.
  - philsnow 5y ago
    a gem: https://flic.kr/p/2kXgdbq https://flic.kr/p/2kXgdbq
michrassena 5y ago
For a year or two Goodwill had an actual computer store full of random stuff. I bought a massive 22 inch CRT there for $50. SCSI drives, cables galore - there were lots of things that you wouldn't find on any other store shelf. eBay was a thing then too, but that store, along with the other thrift stores, was good for a thrifty find. Sometimes there was a profit to be made. Other times it was interesting junk. It was a bit of a low-grade thrill and cheap entertainment for the browser.
astronautjones 5y ago
it really depends on location. last month I got a brand new usb turntable (that had a goodwill sticker with a barcode, they knew what it was) for $9.
HysteriaStrange 5y ago
Goodwill (at least mine, there are a lot of them) does take computers, but because of data security they aren’t sold in stores. Most Goodwills sell computers on eBay or shopgoodwill.com after they’ve been wiped.

by floren 5y ago

sjg007 5y ago

Bulk clothes that don't sell get turned into rags.

grecy 5y ago
In my experience, they wind up for sale in street markets all across Africa for extremely low prices. In 35 countries I saw American clothes in HUGE piles for sale.. many still had the goodwill tag (or other donation brands) still attached. I bought plenty of shorts and t-shirts from these vendors :)
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Oh yeah, mitumba, something that has thoroughly wrecked African textile industries - hard to compete with "almost free" Ironically, "fast fashion" may finally bring an end to this, since this low quality stuff in donated (and thus almost destroyed) form isn't worth being shipped over to Africa, whereas "fresh" FF clothing from Asia is as cheap as mitumba was before.
- nitwit005 5y ago
  I'd assume much of that was new, as cloths regularly fail to sell.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    I know some of it is preemptively-prepared clothing for things that don’t happen, like commemorating championship wins of teams that end up losing. The stuff for the finalists is ready to sell for the day the winner is decided, the actual winners stuff is sold and the rest is dumped overseas.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > the rest is dumped overseas. Or worse, shredded outright. In Germany alone, 230 million pieces of clothing (or 10% of the year's offering) are shredded without ever being worn (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-Hunderte-Millionen-Textilien-fabrikneu-vernichtet.html https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-H...).
  - grecy 5y ago
    Based on the condition, at least 99% of it was used, heavily.
URSpider94 5y ago
One of my favorite used clothing stores is The Garment District in Cambridge, MA. It’s actually an outgrowth of a recycled fiber company that makes janitorial wiping cloths. The good stuff goes to the vintage clothing store upstairs, the somewhat-junky stuff goes to the “dollar-a-pound” floor downstairs, the leftovers get made into rags.

andrew_ 5y ago

Along with Salvation Army, they've increased their prices to the point where it's no longer worth buying from them versus surfing eBay or OfferUp for a good deal on stuff in considerably better shape. I too remember the late 90s and early 00s fondly at the thrift shop. My childhood stereo systems were exclusively found items at Salvation Army (on Grand River, which had the biggest stereo selection) and my first few modems came from SA. It's something I don't think today's youth have available.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Printed t-shirts at my local Goodwill are more expensive than brand new ones at Wal-Mart a few blocks away. Goodwill seems like it's only a good deal if you're buying whatever higher end stuff they happen to have.
WalterBright 5y ago
My home theater system has a $20 thrift store stereo coupled with $20 thrift store speakers. It's equipment that would have cost maybe $500 new. I also pickup up monitors, keyboards, mice, cables, and power strips there. Mostly what I get there are books. I like books, and it's a cheap hobby when you get 'em from the thrift store. From the pawn shop I get laptops and webcams. Also lots of tools. I put together a toolkit for my car this way - cheap tools aren't a theft target.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Is there a Goodwill-type organization that focuses on electronics that I can donate to? These days you need a phone or computer just to apply for a job, let alone function in society.

fy20 5y ago
it's more work, but pretty much any old laptop or phone you can sell on eBay. You can donate the proceeds if you wish.
kazoomonger 5y ago
This exists locally to me, you might have something similar near you: https://www.freegeektwincities.org/ https://www.freegeektwincities.org/ They've been great for both buying and selling. They take old cables that don't even work any more and recycle them for scrap.
Fogest 5y ago
I see a lot of people give these kinds of things out via online marketplaces either for free or for cheap prices now. In Ontario it seems like the popular sites for this are Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace.
rsj_hn 5y ago
pretty sure you can go on craigslist and get nearly free stuff if you are in desperate need of a computer or phone. Let's look at phoenix craigslist. * Here's a guy who looks like he stole a truck carrying Dell Optiplexes, buried them in his backyard, and has now dug them up to sell for $40 each. He's got 50 of them! https://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/sys/d/laveen-dell-optiplex-755-sff-pc/7293690577.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/sys/d/laveen-dell-optiple... * Here's a Dell Inspiron for $35 ($20 without charger) https://tucson.craigslist.org/sys/d/tucson-dell-inspiron-1464-laptop/7315733710.html https://tucson.craigslist.org/sys/d/tucson-dell-inspiron-146... * Here's a Lenovo xc10 laptop for $95. Not a bad deal. https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-lenovo-x130e-laptop/7315196222.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-lenov... * Dell Latitude for $90 https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-dell-latitude-e4300-laptop/7307065954.html https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-dell-... Bottom line, if you are willing to use an old computer, you can get one for less than the price of dinner for two at Applebee's.

asdff 5y ago

The goodwill situation today for niche electronics is actually better than it was back then, thanks to the auction site imo.

serf 5y ago
the volume/variety may have increased, but the value-finds have gotten much worse. As a kid I used to frequent the Goodwill Electronics Waste store in Santa Ana, you could kit entire machines together for just a few twenties; the value of the parts compared to their once retail price was maybe 5 or 10 % of the MSRP even back then. I went back two years ago to satisfy my nostalgia and found the place now filled with 3-4 year old product that hovered around the cost to buy the same parts on an online vendor of some sort, and any of the interestingly-old-but-useless equipment like old ISA video cards/early PCI stuff/AT keyboards/anything beige was marked up so huge by some staffer that mistook vintage for value that it was absolutely impossible to find anything worth buying. Water damaged gameboy faded-grey cartridge? 200 dollars. Pentium 3 e-Machine? 300 dollars. 480 line composite security camera with no power supply and no hope that it will ever do anything useful ever again in the future? Does it have a beige or metal casing? 200 dollars. I think I ended up finding some cheap molex-style 12v fan to buy for a few bucks (more than any online retailer, still), but it was mostly just a guilt purchase to help support the Goodwill. I left incredibly disappointed.
- bombcar 5y ago
  There was a golden era around the 2000s where Goodwill was amazing for deals - then someone wised up on values of some items and they just went nuts on pricing, especially anything that looks "high tech" - I suspect overpricing computers and not selling ANY of them is why the Goodwills won't take any computers anymore.
- troupe 5y ago
  So are the prices adjusting to the market? I'd assume the price would get marked down eventually to the point where they can move stuff to make way for other things that come in. While their cost basis is low, they still have to move inventory to be sustainable. I just wonder if maybe there are a bunch of people out there willing to pay those prices for some reason.

II2II 5y ago

I also miss those magical times. Part of the magic was haggling over prices since nobody actually knew if the electronics would work, or simply because you carted off several boxes of stuff they couldn't sell. I managed to explore a number of 8 and 16-bit platforms from the 1980's and early 1990's because of that. Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken. They knew a lot of people were looking for cheap stuff they could fix, either for personal pleasure or to make a few dollars.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken. I suspect that thet haven’t gotten any less tolerant, just what people are willing to buy from them at a cost that covers justifies the inventory space given competition for the space has changed.
- j4yav 5y ago
  Isn’t it the lack of space/economics that is making them less tolerant of keeping junk around? Or do you mean something else?
  - II2II 5y ago
    There was some concern about liability. One of the shops I frequented in the late 1990's would only let customers who they trusted browse through their sorted junk piles. These piles contained things like bicycles, which had to be thoroughly inspected and properly repaired in order to be safe. I also noticed a transition towards boutique style stores around that time. While the older stores may sell a box of books or bag of clothes for a few dollars, the newer stores would only sell items at their sticker price (or with a fixed discount during sales). Less product moved since people would only buy something when they felt it was worth the sticker price, rather than paying what they felt something was worth. The transition made space/economics more of a factor than it used to be. Some of the old style stores still exist, but they are increasingly difficult to find.

banana_giraffe 5y ago

It was local to the area, of course, but in that time too, but the Boeing Surplus Store was a magical place for me as a young tinkerer. I probably have a box or two of random interesting looking electronics I bought floating around with the hope to figure out how to make it blink again. Not to mention one of my first PCs being some random office worker's PC that had been upgraded. I'm still bummed they closed it down.

tomcam 5y ago
That place was magical. Sheets of titanium, amazing industrial-strength steel scissors for a dollar, military steel desks, all encircled by those amazing paintings of airplane prototypes.
hadlock 5y ago
Boeing Surplus Store felt like.... wandering into Doctor Who's garage. Yeah we came home with some plate titanium, giant sheets of memory foam that got repurposed on our boat, we bought a trailer designed to haul bar steel, then converted it into a canoe trailer for the local boy scout troop, my dad would buy brass bar stock and turn it into POG slammers on his metal lathe that he also got at Boeing Surplus. Just acres and acres of weird cool stuff.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I remember trying to pick up a piece of stainless steel "pipe" there. The piece was about 18" in diameter, maybe 24-36" long. The "pipe walls" were nearly 2" thick. At the time, I could lift one end of an upright piano in the sense of getting both wheels off the floor. I had never experienced the sense of utter futility before trying to lift that pipe. The complete and overwhelming sense that I would never be able to make it move even 1mm off the floor.
- VLM 5y ago
  V = pi r squared times height so figure about 3 times 18 squared times 36 thats about 35K cubic inches if solid, or 2 inch thick walls means subtract 3 times 14 squared times 35 thats about 21K cubic inches. So a good 14K cubic inches of stainless. Engineering rule of thumb to one sig fig (I mean we are assuming pi=3) is stainless is about a quarter of a pound per cu inch, so that pipe weighed about 3500 pounds. A good engineer should be able to do all this in his head; to one sig fig that pipe weighed about as much as a lightweight F-150 pickup truck (not the extended bed super crew cab LOL thats probably 5000 pounds) World record squat lift was 1036 pounds as I recall. LOL No not my record, my heaviest set on Friday was 480 and 8 reps.

wheybags 5y ago

I dunno, LGR on youtube seems to find a lot of cool retro tech there[1]. A lot of crap too though. Not American, so I can't comment personally. 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofBZmDBuqNPnCdt https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofB...

yaml-ops-guy 5y ago
Love the coincidence of laying on my couch watching LGR on a Friday night at the very moment that I find a comment on HN talking about LGR.
kalleboo 5y ago
He does, but you have to remember that each 15 minute episode is recorded over a period of months (like 4-6 months) of him visiting several stores weekly. So it's not like you'll find anything interesting every time you go. I'm lucky to live in Japan where we have a junk store called "hard off" that focuses on hardware. They always have some obscure interesting stuff, tons of Laserdisc players, VHD, HD-VHS, Famicom floppy drives, etc. https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/albums/72157719132609607 https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/albums/72157719132609...
- xkeysc0re 5y ago
  Wow what a store. My bank account is thankful there's nothing like that near me
- timr 5y ago
  Hard off is really good, and there's nothing comparable in the US. You can pretty much get every recent model of cellphone, iPad, Mac, etc. in like-new condition, at a fraction of the price of new. The stuff in this photo album is the "junk" section at the back of the store, and it's still way better than what you'd find at vintage store in the US. In general, vintage stores in Japan are amazing. I don't know how they manage to find such a huge quantity of like-new stuff.
- philsnow 5y ago
  a gem: https://flic.kr/p/2kXgdbq https://flic.kr/p/2kXgdbq

michrassena 5y ago

For a year or two Goodwill had an actual computer store full of random stuff. I bought a massive 22 inch CRT there for $50. SCSI drives, cables galore - there were lots of things that you wouldn't find on any other store shelf. eBay was a thing then too, but that store, along with the other thrift stores, was good for a thrifty find. Sometimes there was a profit to be made. Other times it was interesting junk. It was a bit of a low-grade thrill and cheap entertainment for the browser.

astronautjones 5y ago

it really depends on location. last month I got a brand new usb turntable (that had a goodwill sticker with a barcode, they knew what it was) for $9.

HysteriaStrange 5y ago

Goodwill (at least mine, there are a lot of them) does take computers, but because of data security they aren’t sold in stores. Most Goodwills sell computers on eBay or shopgoodwill.com after they’ve been wiped.