The Hunt for Treasure

You’ve heard the stories. An average Joe walks into a thrift shops, pokes around, picks up a painting or a vase or some other random item for a couple of bucks and actually ends up with a collectible piece worth hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars.

If not here's a few. A Phoenix resident dropped a paltry $5.99 at a local Thrift Store on a diving watch that he discovered to be a rare 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre — one of only 900 ever made. Around the same time an elderly Ohio couple plunked down 58 cents for a West Point sweater that turned out to have belonged to the late NFL legend Vince Lombardi … with an estimated value of about $20,000.

So how come when the rest of us head to a local thrift store we only seem to find old T-shirts, cheap jewelry and weathered paperback books? Turns out there’s an art to the game of thrift shopping. Here, are some tips on finding a valuable needle in a haystack of junk.

There are sets of china that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and you can very easily find it for $19.99 for the entire set.

More often than not, if someone is emptying out Grandma’s house, they don’t want to go through all of her furniture to figure out if one armoire is worth $3,000. Thus, high-end pieces of furniture worth hundreds or thousands can wind up at thrift stores with price tags of $50 or less.

Bring your cell phone, back in the day, you’d have to really know your stuff in order to recognize if something on the shelf was worth a small fortune or not. Today, anyone can become a quick expert thanks to the Internet, within minutes I can usually find out what it’s worth. Furniture often features a stamp with the manufacturer’s name on the back of the piece or inside a top drawer.

Go Often (But Not Necessarily Early). If you work a full-time office job, you might be out of luck as many thrift store treasure hunters hit up the stores multiple times a day. But even if you can’t pop in that frequently, don’t worry about what time you get there. Though you might assume you’re better off going at 9 a.m. vs. 3 p.m., you never know when a treasure is going to hit the shelf.

Skip the Flea Market. It makes sense: A vendor selling a few dozen – or even a hundred – items, at a flea market booth is totally on top of what every item is worth and what he or she needs to get to make a profit. People who are holding flea markets are professionals so they know what they have. Your best bet on finding a complete diamond in the rough, passed-over treasure thrift store where the prices are oftentimes people who aren’t trained in high-end brands and how to identify antiques.

Get to know the workers at your local thrift shop and, if you’re on the lookout for something specific, let them know. Ask them to text you when a piece of furniture you're in the market for shows up. It pays to be friendly, and it’s always fun to say ‘Hey, I just bought a $1,500 coffee table today for 40 bucks!

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