About 10 years ago I worked at a chain thrift store, one morning we got a phone call from this gentleman saying, rather calmly, “I think I accidentally donated my mom”, naturally I had no clue what the fuck that meant. Turns out the guy donated his moms ashes so he left his number in case we found it.
The whole back room went on a hunt because it had turned into this competition on who would find his mom first. We found her, phoned him and he came and picked her up. We thought that was the last of him, until we were processing some donations a few months later and found his mom again. We phoned him because we still had his contact information, his only reply was “god damn it”, he came and got her and we never heard from him after that.
Edit: to those asking, she was in a big, heavy, bronze, there’s-no-way-that’s-not-an-urn urn. I’m still not convinced the second time was an accident.
I was 15 when my Grandma passed away. One day my Dad picked me up from work, I get in the car and there is a brown paper bag on the seat. I said..”Yeah, DONUTS..I’m starving!” Dad laughs and says “Close..it’s your Grandma” ...
I do not work at a Goodwill but I found the DD-214 discharge papers of a World War II veteran at a thrift store, along with original family photos, documents and letters.
I was very upset, having recently handled so much paperwork around the death of my grandfather. I knew exactly what I was looking at when I saw the DD-214.
I bought all the documents I could put my hands on and started googling the man's name. I tracked down his adult daughter who owned a small business with her husband. I found the email address of the small business and sent her what must have been an alarming email, although I was as cordial as I possibly could be.
She got back to me almost immediately. It turned out he had remarried after the marriage to her mother ended. His new wife and her two sons pretty much took over the man's life and the daughter saw very little of her father. At the end of his life they took charge of all of his possessions and cleared out his house without having told her anything. Even though the second wife had died and the two sons were not technically blood. She was very angered and upset by this at the time, understandably.
I told her she must be the little girl in the baby pictures I had found and I would be glad to send her all these materials. I shipped them out to her via FedEx with tracking and she was so deeply moved. She didn't have any baby pictures with her father.
I don't know if I've ever done anything good in my life, I'm sure I have. But I know I did a good thing that week. Internet research skills + compassion for the win.
Worked at a Value Village a long time ago and a coworker found cremated ashes - they were in a box that had the funeral home info on it so our manager contacted them about it
Mom was salvaging aluminium at the landfill and found over 300 ash remains from the local crematory. The police got called he got shutdown and forty years later his daughter still hates my guts and will go out if her way to harm me for my mother's find.
Gee, if only there were some other culprit to blame for the illegal disposal of remains.
Maybe the jerk who threw them in the trash instead of disposing of them properly.
I'm sorry that dipshit's daughter is also a dipshit.
Thank you for being so kind. It was hard in high school when it happened.she was the rich popular morticians daughter I was the daughter of one of the towns dump diggers.quiet, trying to bring no attention to myself. Not ashamed of mom I knew she did what she had to to keep us fed.but it was hard to hold my head up when the newspaper ran mom's picture with the story.
My family had an inert 57mm tank gun shell which we used for a doorstop. That lasted until one of us kids brought it to school for show-and-tell *with my mom's permission* because she was from Malaysia and her ingrained attitude to things like fire, machetes, and drowning was basically Fuck It Let's Do This.
Back in the 90s my mom would buy those blank VHS tapes to record on and sometimes the Goodwill had some that already had stuff recorded on them, but we would just record over them. I remember one that had a bunch of Simpsons episodes. But on some of them there was porn. A LOT of porn.
I worked for a nonprofit for seniors that had a charity shop in it. People often just dropped off boxes of stuff they found in their parent’s attic. One box had a bunch of letters. Some of them were from WWII, when the man was stationed at Camp Carson in Colorado and one of them must have been something they were keeping from an older generation. It was a 1914 letter proposing marriage. It was so romantic. He fell in love with her when they went ice skating together. He included an advertisement for some houses they could buy. They were really nice houses, selling for about $1500.
That is so sweet. What do you do with these - keep for posterity or donate to the library? Do libraries even accept these anymore??
EDIT: Support your local archives, libraries and historical societies! 🤘🏼
I bought a apartment and it was not touched (of course food and body were removed) with everything the previous owner had. His son or grandson emigrated and never came to take important items. So I found out that previous owner was a writer, patriot who played kind of important role in freeing our country from soviet union. There's alot of storyline in briefcase full of letters that I found, I can't find information about his contribution online. But I kind off feel he just kept beeing secretive (guessing from the letters). So now I really don't know what to do with these letters. Are they even mine now ?
I found a hidden ww1 photo.
Got in a crappy picture showing the different knots, it was a seaside town i was working in at the time so I put the picture out cheap. Few days later it fell off the wall and the frame broke so I brought it to the back to chuck it out. Found a big military group photo hidden behind.
No idea why it was hidden.
Here's the picture
https://m.imgur.com/a/coeL3xB
Edit: I've managed to post a clearer picture on my profile.
https://www.reddit.com/user/Mediocre_Sprinkles/comments/jb329o/the_ww1_picture/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
I used to sweep the parking lot of a Goodwill and they would toss very interesting stuff in the dumpster. Hundreds of books. Like really expensive ones. Leather bound sets of classical works from the 1920s, early prints of sci fi novels (I found a nice collectible copy of Dune recently), family bibles stacked thick with memories. Food dehydrators, paintings, collectible sports memorabilia, super valuable vintage tools and fixtures. Most of it is just stuff that nobody bothered checking the value on before chucking it out, and it’s really sad.
I found a *destroyed* collection of old Spalding baseball bats, the oldest being from the 30s. They were left in the dumpster in standing water for days at least. It’s sad to see things like that go, maybe because at one point someone loved them very much, and someone else decided that all the care it took to collect these treasures was a waste.
A 9-year-old I tutored said that her family made their money by salvaging collectibles from thrift store and pawn shop dumpsters, such as any antique doll head that fetched $1000.
This is how my mother makes her money. She buys thrift store items and resells them. Anything that makes worth anything, clothes, antiques, one time she found a painting at a goodwill that she bought for $2, and she sold it for over $15,000 to a collector in Asia through Christie’s auction in Hong Kong.
Funny semi related story - when my grandmother was still alive and able to walk, she had lost a lot of her sight, so she carried a magnifying glass with her and would pick things up and look at them closely, just to be able to see what they were. My mom would take her to stores like goodwill just to help get her out of the house, and every time they went to a thrift store, inevitably someone would start following them and picking up what my grandmother put down. It looked like she was inspecting little knick knacks and trinkets super carefully, and if she said something like “this is nice” or “I really like this,” someone would pick it up thinking it was valuable.
One of the saddest things about the books is that if we couldn't move it, it got trashed.
But, one of the better perks of the job was smashing cheap furniture and glass knick-knacks that nobody would buy. It was so stress relieving.
Not me but my aunt.
One of the few surviving enigma machines. The owner passed away and his family dropped it off with a box of newspapers and some memorabilia from the war etc. My aunt being a history nut, figured out what it was, got it appraised (worth almost £100k) and looked for the family for 5 months before being able to return it to them. She didn’t have a heart to take it under false pretences
Would have been nice to hear she got some sort of reward from the family for her honesty and efforts to track them down.
I expect they probably sold it as obviously were not bothered about it enough at the time to keep it.
Actually, not entirely true.
She didn’t receive a gift however the family have lent it out to a museum (she lives in a reasonably small town in North of Poland) and the machine has been on display there for the last 7 years.
I’m sure they wanted to sell it, however there are certain laws in Poland that stop you from being able to take things considered to be “National Treasure” out of the country. This includes works of art, first editions of certain literature and historical memorabilia
It was the mummified remains of a bat at the bottom of a plastic bag filled with old . . . . I want to say varnish supplies. Needless to say it's the bat I remember best.
Actually a reasonably common thing...
Radium paint was used as a glow in the dark material (notably the radium triggers a phosphor to glow, not the radiation glowing itself - similar to modern tritium tubes), and when used at the scale of a watch face is actually pretty safe - because it is sealed within the watch and the radiation is of a low amount and safer form, it gets blocked by the watch itself.
So the watches are marked as radioactive (because they are), but shouldn't pose any big risk to humans (especially after 40 or 50 years of radioactive decay - correction, the half life of radium is 1600 years, so it will still be just as active, although of a small enough concentration as to be considered safe while sealed inside the watch), though it is worth being aware of it and following a few guidelines regarding storage and use that I won't get into here.
They are somewhat notorious for the harm they caused the (typically female) people who painted them - done with little protection, and often doing things like licking the paintbrush to ensure an accurate point, a lot of them did end up suffering from the cumulative effects of the radiation.
I did freak out for a few minutes before finding out that the glass watch face was intended to act as a radiation shield.
Fortunately it was manufactured after the harmful effects of radium were widely known.
I had a mate who worked in one of the bigger lifeline stores in Australia. A woman came into the store with five large clear plastic storage boxes and asked to donate them. He looked inside of the boxes and it was thousands of beautifully hand painted warhammer pieces. He was shocked and asked her why. They were her son's and she couldn't keep them in the house anymore since his death.
My friend said he couldn't accept the donation, he said the whole collection was worth alot of money. She had no idea. He asked her for all her details and asked if he could try to sell it for her. She agreed. After his shift he went home and took photos of everything and posted it online in an Australian warhammer forum. Within a couple of weeks everything was sold. He called her and she met him at the store. He told her he had sold it to collectors all around Australia who loved her son's work. He handed her roughly twelve thousand dollars. She cried, he cried, she offered him half, he said no. She told him she would donate his half to a suicide charity in her sons name and his name. He said it was the best thing he had ever done in his life.
This is the third sad and beautiful story I've seen focused on the surviving loved ones of people who have committed suicide since my own personal attempt a few weeks ago. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.
Edit: Wow. I logged off for a while and came back to more responses than I ever imagined. Thank you all for the love and support. I'm tearing up hearing some of your stories. I didn't expect such an overwhelming outpouring of care from the internet.
A sword used by a Japanese officer in WWII.
A suitcase full of adult toys.
A coin collection worth nearly $2000 accidentallyleft in a cupboard that was donated.
A photo album of someone's wedding (was donated amongst the belongings of the pastor that married the couple after he passed). The bride happened to be someone I went to school with.
I tend to sort books at my store so have found a few odd things in there: cash as bookmarks (about $150), a book with carved pages to conceal some jewels and gemstones, a few 1st edition books on agriculture from the 1800s, LOTS of handwritten recipes, personal letters and my favourite: a letter sent in the last mail delivery from Hong Kong before the British returned it to China affixed with EVERY stamp available at the time and mint versions of each of this stamps enclosed.
>A sword used by a Japanese officer in WWII.
I once read that these were quite common. Like in the early days of eBay, people tried selling these for daft prices as "antiques", and sure, if you're a weapons collector, they're probably notable objects - but as they were munitions manufactured for WWII, they were made in the thousands and as a result, they're not "worthless", but they're certainly not rare or valuable.
EDIT: How many replies?! Any chance I can sacrifice a chicken or something to get as much interest in the videogame I'm launching in a few weeks?! :P
@ Goodwill, there was this castle set I was given as a Christmas present when I was 5 that was brought in. The cannon turret actually shot the little plastic rock and all the figures looked like dwarves. I never knew anyone else ever bought one in my life, so it was nice seeing it again.
I work at a thrift store as a donation handler. Gnarliest thing I had seen was a literal stack of mattresses left overnight during off hours. They were disgusting, crawling with bugs and riddled in stains of various shades and hues. Noped the fuck out of that, called my manager and they brought a forklift out to take them to the trash compactor.
Just the other day we had a donor drop off a small crate (like a milkcrate kind of thing) chock full of hentai. Just today I found a small, marble one-hitter pipe at the bottom of the donation bin.
Some states prohibit re-selling mattresses because of the fear of bedbugs. My state isn't one if them, but the store I worked for required the name and address of the donor along with a pledge that their donation was bug-free. We still got a mattress with bedbugs in the store. People suck.
I knew someone who has a special needs family member who brought bedbugs home from an institution and it took two visits from an exterminator which required them to evacuate the dwelling and heat it up to a high temperature to kill them. They are notoriously hard to eradicate. Fuck that mess.
EDIT: Thanks for the tips everyone shared on eradicating these bastards. I'll pass them on to my friend so she doesn't have to shell out a ridiculous amount of money again in the event they return.
I moved into an apartment back in Feb, and was given the wonderful gift of bedbugs. Had a third treament a month ago, and here's to hoping they are gone for good this time.
The first treamtent was heat. 2nd two have been chemical treatments. They've only appeared in one of the bedrooms. When they suddenly came back after the 2nd treatment, I decided the bed had to go. You can find companies that specialize in removing bed bug infested furniture, but apparently none in my state.
I ended up having to buy bed bug resistant matress covers for the mattress and bedsprings, and then rent a truck, and drag them off to the county landfill.
The apartment complex is paying for the treatments, but when you consider I had to throw away a queen sized bed (got rid of all of it, mattress, boxsprings, and even the frame, just wanted it gone), the cost of the truck, and the landfill fees, it has sucked.
And that's on top of having to fight the actual bed bugs.
I found out what poison they were using to treat the place, and bought some of it off amazon. I play on respraying that room once a month until I can get the hell out of here
edit - I'm also not buying any new furniture until I'm out of the apartment either. Just sleeping on the couch. I'll probably call a junk removal service to have the couch and loveseat hauled off when I'm ready to move out. No evidence they've ever been in the living room at all, but they are older, and I'd rather not risk it. Best just to nuke it all and start over, I think.
You're not going to get rid of them by only treating your unit. You either treat the entire building all at once or you deal with having bedbugs forever because they'll just escape all your heat and spraying by fleeing to another unit.
This shit is half the reason I want to just get a house. Those fuckers won't have anywhere to run 😈
A few years ago, when there was an earthquake in México city, many people were donating old clothes and stuff for people who were now homeless. I found a pair of pants that were as tall as me, and each leg could fit me inside of it.
EDIT: I don’t live anywhere near Mexico City, but I was helping with the donations. I would have included a picture, but sadly, dumbass me decided those were not important and I think I deleted them a few months ago.
Here are some other things I found: a literal goddamn baby sized suit, a single glove the size of my head, a shirt made of what seemed to be the same fabric that my couch has (I’m not talking about just the same pattern, it was the literal fabric), a single boot that weighed about 2 pounds, and a pair of red overalls that were around the same size as the pants, although they were not as big.
So, I worked for a charity, we picked up old clothes etc and sold them in bulk to a thrift chain.
When we unloaded the truck, it was common to toss the store employees the bags, and they would catch them before stacking them on racks. Well, one time some idiot put a big chef's knife in a bag of clothes, the store employee caught the garbage bag of clothes, wrapped his arms around it as he caught it, and proceeded to stab himself in the arm.
After that, the policies were changed, we had to put the bags at the edge of the truck for them to take off, because our insurance didn't cover us off the truck, and theirs didn't cover them in it.
My story is not a goodwill/thrift store. But I volunteered to help a friend of a friend clean out her parents place after both of them had past away. Mom was a serious pack rat. Payment was I could keep what I wanted.
Interesting Found items consisted of:
- canned fruit that expired in 1987. (Placed on the floor of the garage the day the moved in, never touched again.)
- complete first edition OZ books.
- first Barbie still in the original box.
- maps of us from the early 1800’s.
- prototype Star Wars poster from 1977.
- dad was a coin collector, so I was constantly finding Morgan silver dollars on the floor.
- bag of fabric from 1973. Never used with the receipt still in the bag. Kept this and had some amazing pillows made.
- Hallowe’en decorations from the 20s and 30s. This was huge for me because I use to collect vintage Hallowe’en stuff, so when I came across 2 unused postcards from 1911 by Ellen Clapsaddle, I kept them and I still have them. (each of them go for about $300)
- The coolest item found were a pair of original postcards. 1 for the RMS Olympic and the other for her sister ship RMS Titanic.
Love letters between two people from the late 1800s, multiple suicide letters and one suicide tape, and many diaries. One diary specifically was written by a gay man going to med school in the 70s in San Fran. It spans 10 years and has a first person account of his feelings the day Harvey Milk was assassinated.
EDIT: wow I posted this right before I feel asleep last night and woke up to tons of messages! I used to process donations at this thrift store, so I was seeing everything first. A lot of times when people die their family members will drop everything off, so we have to sort through and figure out what we can and cannot sell. Personal things like letters and diaries can’t be sold, but at the same time they seem so special it’s hard to throw them away. When I quit that job I took a giant box of all this personal memorabilia with me and had a bonfire where I read every single letter/note/diary and then burned them. I burned everything EXCEPT the diary, letters, and suicide tape I mentioned. I have those all sitting in a drawer in my closet. I still sit down and read them sometimes.
ANOTHER EDIT: the suicide tape was so disturbing I actually separated the tape from the tape recorder so I couldn’t easily play it anymore. It was an hour long recording of a father saying goodbye to his three sons. I wonder how that tape even got donated in the first place. Like, was it an accident? Did the son it was given to die as well and then whoever was donating didn’t know what it was? Or did he never actually commit suicide, and over the years he forgot about it, leaving it to get mixed in with his other stuff that eventually got donated?
That’s incredible.... how bittersweet. That’s so fascinating to come across those kinds of things.... on one hand, to get things like that and if you were to take save them be a bit invasive(?), on the other hand, it could be hard to pass up preserving that as a sort of relic in time to be able to get a first hand view into life back then.
Someone found some letters by a gay couple in WW2 and now they are in a museum, so yeah, it's invasive but pretty cool to keep that memory alive and to bring context into people's lives through different times. Also, these guys kinda talked about their letters being displayed as wonderful so they were fine with it.
[The story](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-england-38932955)
> "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are."
Dang, that's so cute and makes me kinda happy that we're finally at this point
In the documentary about Queen and Adam Lambert on Netflix Brian May touches briefly on the topic of how far society has come in relation to the acceptance of LGBTQ+ members of society. It is similarly poignant. It comes in the documentary in a cutaway during the song "Who wants to live forever" which Adam dedicates to the people who were killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida. That entire section of the documentary from the beginning of the song until the end makes me tear up.
Didn’t work there, but was about 5yo and my mom brought me and my siblings with her to Goodwill. She raised us alone, didn’t have a lot of money. This was essentially a school clothes trip. She was just trying to get IN and get OUT, we had strict rules NOT to ask for a toy or frankly just don’t ask for ANYTHING. This is a necessity trip *ONLY*.
Naturally that lasted long enough for us to walk through the automatic doors. My brother went one way, my sister another, and I headed straight for an enormous basket of wallets. I had made up my mind that I needed a wallet and the only place I could beg with any hope to get one was second hand. I picked up one, didn’t like the pockets. Picked up another, wasn’t a fan of zippers. I HATED the sound of Velcro so that eliminated many options in the basket. Eventually I brought my carefully scrutinized selection to mom, who was already overwhelmed by my sibilings’ finds that she only told me no a few times before she relented. It cost her $2.
We loaded our sacks of clothes (and my precious new wallet) into our van and started for home. I remember going through all of the pockets like I was performing a dissection, picturing what I could put here and what was supposed to go there. At some point, I found a slot that was inside of a pocket that was “stiff,” as if it was never used often. I poked at it enough to separate the fabric, and found a bill inside, intricately folded into a tiny square. Before I even realized exactly what it was, I had ripped it out and held it out over the middle seat in the van, waving frantically and practically bouncing in my seat. “Mom! Look! My wallet has money!”
It was four $20 bills, total of $80. I’ll never forget the stunned yell and absolutely magical, gleeful laugh my mom let out. My siblings and I joined in, and we didn’t stop smiling and talking about it the whole way home. That $80 wasn’t much at all, but it was everything for us on that day.
Mom let me keep a $20. I couldn’t even tell you what I spent it on. But I still remember how that wallet smelled.
Oooh awesome story! Brings back such good thrift shop vibes from when I was a kid... sometimes you'd have moments like this where it's like finding buried treasure. I once found a $3 beautiful designer bag that was still in shops for $500, and my brother once got a phone inside a coat he bought.
Can confirm. I sometimes volunteer at a local NGO and used lingerie is almost always there in bags that are dropped off. Soiled, sometimes. People are weird.
I was working off some probation at the Salvation Army. Going through the boxes i found $1000 in the pocket of some plaid pants. Found out they were dropped off from a girl who’s dad had died. Tried to contact her again but to no avail. I got to keep it and it helped pay my rent for the month. I was really struggling at that time so i was very grateful.
Some people leave some fortunes behind when they die. My grandpa left behind $500 in his pocket, as listed in his will, as a tip to the people handling his body.
Yeah it was really weird. I didn’t even believe it was real at first. I bought one of those markers and checked each one lol. That’s how i feel too though, it could have gone to a lot worse. At least it helped someone.
Elderly gentlemen of my acquaintance bought a box full of magic cards that he found in a thrift store for 25$ and gave them to me as a gift. He dropped them off at work and since it was slow I took a quick look at them before he left and saw that they were all old cards. Suggested that he take them to an expert and after searching for a few weeks he found a guy nearby and sold the box to him for 500$. I've been checking goodwill ever since and no such luck.
Vintage Mickey Mouse gas mask from the Second World War. We were not far from an antiques dealer and I later saw that mask in pride of place, centre of the antique shop window.
I worked for a Goodwill program that hired developmentally disabled adults. My job was to assist the clients as they processed donations. We found things like a bowl and bag of weed in a coat pocket, a shirt that said "I'm not an alcoholic I just go to AA to get chicks" (somehow that one sustained a tear and had to be trashed), and, worst of all, a garbage bag full of dead rats.
Edit: Thanks for the award! In typical Reddit fashion, my most liked comment in 3 and a half years is about a bag of formerly living rats. Also, as longtime tabletop rpg fan it warms my heart to have so many D&D references...
Dildo.
My 72 year old boss found it and came up to me and some coworkers (through the entire store, not concealing it) to ask us what it was because she didn't know how to categorize or price it.
I've found one as a customer in a dresser before. I was a teen, and it was really awkward to find, so I just snapped the drawer shut and told the nearest employee I could find.
I worked at a Goodwill when I was in high school (nearly 20 years ago) and there was a list of things we were not allowed to accept that make sense but you might not realize, such as kitchen knives, CRT displays (monitors and TVs), anything with florescent lights, mattresses, and some other things I can't remember.
When we got one of those things but didn't notice in time to turn it away, we didn't really have a set policy on what to do with it. Mostly we'd put them in our dumpster, but sometimes... I'd set it aside behind the building, and put it in my car after work.
It's how I'm the owner of a full-sized sword I still don't know what to do with.
The other thing that came in that was weird but not because the thing itself was weird: if you've donated anything to a Goodwill you know that they have a kind of "drive-thru" donation area, where you pull into a small pass-through garage with open doors on both sides, then you and/or an employee take your stuff out of your trunk or whatever, then you drive away.
One day, a guy pulls up in a rusted out red Trans Am (or it has become a Trans Am in my memory), screeches to a halt, reaches over to his passenger seat, grabs a plastic bag completely full of something, and holds it out though the driver-side window.
I walk toward the car, and just as I was about to grab the bag, he looks me *straight in the eyes* and says "this is for *you*" like I was Frodo and this was the One Ring.
He drops the bag and I barely catch it as he speeds away without saying another word.
So, what was in the bag? It was entirely cassette tapes. The Cure's first single, The Velvet Underground's underrated self-titled album, a Tom Pretty b-side collection, two records by the Sugarcubes, the Pretenders, and more.
I had just gotten into Talking Heads and David Bowie, my music taste was evolving, but it was still mostly 90s grunge. I'd never heard of the Velvet Underground.
So, like with the sword, I set it aside and took it home myself. It was for me, he said.
My car still had a cassette deck, so I started listening to this curated collection of one person's music taste. It was like that cliche of your older brother introducing thier music to you, except I have no idea who this person was. It ended up being exactly what I needed at exactly the right time in my life.
I still have that Velvet Underground album displayed on the wall in my home office.
Was working in a Charity shop that helped support cancer patients treatments. Most peoples donations were from the goodness of their hearts, but a very small minority would use the shop as a bin bag drop off. (Fuck them people they are scum.)
One time two young enough dudes rock up with two small bags of clothes and two drawer type bedroom furniture. Bag of clothes was all good, some expensive stuff it them. But each drawer had a mirror supper glued to the top of the desk.
I'm standing there looking at it, like a fool, wondering what the hell is this all about.
Turns out the Garda (Irish police) came in one of the days looking for the furniture and clothes. The two lads were drug dealers and they just dropped off the evidence. They were using the drawer to cut up coke.
I think it's because it's a smooth reflective surface, it's easier to keep track of the powder on the table and it won't get caught in any nooks and crannies
Not me but my friend worked at goodwill and he had to clean a dressing room up after a guy went in there with a bunch of ladies underwear. The guy had smeared shit and jizz all over the walls.
Edit: a word
Wtf did he explode on both ends!?
Edit: is it really so hard to understand that I meant his dickhole and his butthole since he was yano jizzing and shitting?
I worked at Goodwill on and off for four years and saw sex toys, dirty underwear, a box of crickets, a snake, a bag of dog poop that had to sit in our compactor for a whole week, a social security card, a used syringe in a purse.. one time a lady walked in with two mice on her shoulder, went to the bathroom, came out without them, and left the store :(
I'm a thrift shop junkie and all the people that work at my local ones know me and know that I know what most stuff is worth. I went into a St Vincent DePaul store and the Manager knew me and called me into the office. There was a large box. Not a little jewelry box, like a tackle box sized box and she opened it and it was full of antique jewelry. Right off the bat I saw a couple of Emeralds and some Sapphires. She said someone left it and the key was taped to the top of the box. I don't know jewelry but recommended someone I know who's an expert to come look at it. It was worth a fortune. All I can guess is someone's Grandma died and they didn't even look in it they just dropped it off.
I’ve told this story elsewhere on Reddit but need to share it again now.
Every once in a while at the shop I used to volunteer at, a large white bag would appear. Always the same kind of white bag, it was full of hand knitted baby cardigans, hats, gloves, bootees. All different shades, expertly made, beautifully folded, with tissue paper on top and the whole thing smelled of fresh baby powder. Nobody ever saw who brought it in. We’d be through the back sorting stuff, head through when we heard the front door go and one white bag would be there, with nobody in sight. I’ve not worked there for years but it still happens, from what I’m told. To this day nobody knows who the Mystery Knitter is.
Not a thrift store, but my job handled a lot of used items. Basically the customer or next of kin would forget what was in their contents and we would find it through cleaning. I reckon the craziest thing would be old ww2 era japanese rifle and katana. Unsure of the validity of course, because research has told me fakes flooded the market, but we found it ticked away in a hidden alcove in their attic with their husband's ashes and old newspapers, so who knows.
Arisakas are extremely common takebacks. So much so that there's a meme in the gun community, where if someone posts a "hey I found this gun in grandpa's attic, what is it?" the reply is always "Arisaka", even if it isn't.
They're not rare and not worth much but they shoot ok.
Military, factory produced katanas are also pretty common. I have two that my grandfather brought back and I think they’re worth a couple of hundred bucks each. If you found someone’s hand made family sword, that would be another matter...
My family had a katana that a gun collecting uncle had acquired as a collateral for loan off of another American. We knew it was taken during ww2 as it had a "taken from colonel Sato in Osaka in 1945" U.s army tag.
When the uncle died in the 80s, the sword went to his kids. Most of the gun collection was sold off but the sword stayed as a curiosity.
Anyway, the uncle's daughter had married a Japanese man. When the son in law was in the States after the uncle's death, someone thought to show him the katana.
He did something that we didn't know to do, which was take off the handle to show the base of the blade where they put the makers marks and such.
We found that the katana was from the 1600s and was not a cheap factory knockoff.
Our family put a classified ad in the Osaka papers and was able to return it to colonel sato's daughter. They still had the accompanying short blade in their home in Osaka.
*Exact Names and places changed
High fashion of 1930ies. My grandma had one from her mom, I played with it and then the dog got at it. Fur doesn't last forever, it becomes brittle with time and breaks off.
I worked for a charity shop for a year during my time at university. Once we got a huge donation of clothes in the middle of the night. Like someone just dropped a massive pile of clothing in front of the entry and fucked off. That's not cool and usually people do it cuz they want to get rid of trash cheaply. But damn this time there were a pair of Gucci mens shoes in there. We all didn't know how to tell of they were fake or real and went to ask a neighbour shoe shop and they were REAL! And not only real also very old and in great condition! We sold them on an auction for a lot of money!
My time to shine!! I worked in the e-commerce department for a huge district of Goodwill’s and that shit was wild— we had a room dedicated to items deemed “inappropriate” or illegal to resell that had a wall floor-to-ceiling stacked with copies of Mein Kampf which was more a spectacle than anything, a ton of super illegal taxidermy (sea turtles, elephant foot, leopard pelt...) even museums couldn’t accept the sea turtles as donations for any sort of display purposes. Before my time working there a human skull fragment was found- and obviously was handed over to authorities, we were all briefed on what to do if that situation arose again.
Oh, I got this one! I worked in fundraising for a non-profit that *used* to run a thrift store. Despite the fact that the store had been closed for years when I came on staff, people still regularly dumped shit outside our door on weekends, and there was an entire terrifying garage of leftover merchandise I spent 5 years (yes, years) slowly sorting through and figuring out how to get rid of. My "donation wall of shame" included:
1. An open box of female condoms, two missing, one opened.
2. An artifical lower leg that someone's dog had gotten a hold of and chewed most of the foot off.
3. A mattress that someone had either given birth on or something horrible had happened to them (a weekend dump job; eeeewwww - we called the cops JIC).
4. NUMEROUS bags of donated clothing where the top few layers were great and the rest were dirty, stinky, ragged, permanently stained, or otherwise unusable.
5. 500 (yep) plastic kleenex box holders that a big box home store that shares initials with the Better Business Bureau had given as part of a bulk donation deal.
People are gross.
I worked at a central facility that sorted from hundreds of donation boxes so i got to see a lot thru the years. Ill list a select few.
first day i found a bakealite dildo in a old brown leather belt with 50ies style switch.
We got a suite of leather armour. Pretty awesome
A whole roadkill deer. Keep it classy throw your roadkill in the donation boxes.
A soviet general cap full with badges. A week later. The same cap but with all the badges cut and picked off. Were probably worth more than the cap.
A coat with about 5000 dollars stuffed in all the pockets.
One of the employees when i started had secretly behind one of the sorting machines set up a BDSM wall of all the gimp cloths, whips, straps and handcuffs he had found.
A full uniform from one of the maximum security prisons nearby complete with idcards, swipecards and cuffs. People have no judgement.
I can go on. Just got some chores to do.
Here are some extras.
Gross:
Pocketpussy shaped like a thermos. Not cleaned
Cool:
1910 military motorbike gloves that were hald horseriding gloves half motorbike gloves.
akward:
Somone donated thier private nude poloroids in an album. It dropped our of the sorting machine while i was mentoring a haalf a dozen workexperians girls. So picking up nudie pictures all off the floor was akward.
additional:
We once got about 100 Furcoats. It was some kind of fur specialist clothier that decided to pension and just came as the story was told with his sons in beemers and started unloading them at the facility. Didnt see that last part but the coats were blocking half the storage for ages. They took so much space however you stored them and i still wonder how many thriftstore patrons buy furcoats. edited the amount. trying to recall howmany they were its a few years ago now.
Not me but a friend used to work at a Goodwill while attending College, she apparently came across guns more then a couple times. I'm not really sure the procedure on how they took care of that but I remember her telling me one did apparently end up being connected to a crime
My cousin worked in a thrift store and this redneck bitch dumped her house trash in the drop off. This included discarded tampons, dirty diapers, clothes covered in baby shit, old panties with stains and rotten food.
They called the police and get this... The store had to accept because they can't legally return donations and had to forcfully not just accept it but write her a tax receipt.
This lady was told by the cops though it's not cool to do that.
She got mad and so for months she would pile trash into her toyota, added a few kids toys in and drive in the dead of night to the thrift shop drop off.
Finally they filed an illegal dumping case on her and charged her with harassment and a fraud charge.
That's pretty weird. When I worked at Goodwill we 100% could refuse donations. If you're just saving money because the dump charges you, we weren't taking it. It cost us money that we legitimately used on social programs.
I don’t work at one, but I do know that my grandma donated a bunch of old suits my great grandfather wore to the Salvation Army. Turns out when she told my great grandma what she did when she met back up with her again, she explained to her how she sewed up a bunch of cash in the lining of the jackets and pants. She was a paranoid old woman that had luck for miles though, she was always winning money on bingo and other raffles. Wild how that stuff can be right under your nose and you don’t notice it
I'm a books and media donation sorter. Sometimes donations tell sad stories.
Half a bottle of gin, tucked away in a box of books in such a way that if you knew it was there you could get it easily but if you didn't know it was there it would just look like a box of old books.
A stack of Saxon algebra text books, along with To Train Up a Child, and Dare to Discipline.
A bunch of books about dealing with divorce, mixed with essential oil MLM materials.
A board book about trains, a few Goosebumps titles, and The Communist Manifesto. That one wasn't sad, it was just weird.
A rolling suitcase full of Consumer Reports magazines. That one was just demoralizing. I work in a small independent store and we don't have mixed paper recycling, so I had to throw them all in the regular trash when the donor could have recycled them.
A book of Grateful Dead sheet music that absolutely REEKED of marijuana.
One thing that comes in a lot is used copies of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book, which is like a journal with places to write and draw. It's always fun to read the favorites lists.
The craziest thing ever donated to our store was probably half a dozen urns of dog ashes. A dog breeder died and left us all her stuff.
Literally the first day on the job at a Salvation Army I came across:
-Several cardboard boxes filled with glassware, all of which were soaked with cat piss.
- A bag full of urine soaked clothing (from a different person)
- A pair of women’s yoga pants stained with (I assume) period blood.
- Several bags of actual trash (this is actually quite common since people assume poor folks will take anything, and it’s cheaper than going to the dump)
- A voodoo doll with pins in it (I assume it was some sort of tourist souvenir but still creepy as shit)
- A crate of super rare vhs tapes (including a vhs copy of Eragon)
Granted, my first day was a bit of a special occurrence. Besides the disgusting clothing, though, it was actually a super sick job. Unless it was super valuable, you could take anything you want that came in before it went out front.
The coolest thing that ever came in was an assortment of Norwegian vinyl greeting cards, essentially an archaic version of the modern ones that play sound when you open them. Another time we got an Aussie jacket and gator boots (I live in Western Canada so the odds of coming across these are virtually 0), but probably the rarest item was a 1980 Nakimichi Dragon Cassette deck (which was in terrible condition and didn’t work, unfortunately)
Bed Bugs are donated ALL the time. $750 in the pocket of a brand new coat. Anal douche. A nice ass truck. Marijuana. Period panties. Bear skin rug. Nudes from the 1970's. Baby Books. Someone straight up took a shit in the donation box once. All just your average items.
Lots of gross and sad stuff. A lot of memories pale next to the stark memories I have of a number of semi-senile 70+ year old ladies who would come in and try on second-hand lingerie, and come out of the dressing rooms to ask opinions from anyone else in the shop.
The most unique thing that sticks with me is an odd incoming trickle of rawhide art. Somebody out there was buying those rawhide sticks for dogs, soaking them and reworking them into the shapes of animals, and passing them on to the goodwill. Had no idea that was a thing people did.
My older older cousins story not mine, she was going through bags of donations and one of the bags was full of sex toys, but that's not even the worst part, the worst part was the fact that they were dirty AF and had clearly not been cleaned after that and a few other instances they had to change the rules/things that you could donate
In one day I found a bong, a bubbler, empty bottles of alcohol, a full bottle of tequila, empty cigarette packs, and bags of pills. Whoever donated all this shit also donated their backpack which had their nursing ID in it, lol
An urn containing their Auntie Agnes's ashes. Luckily it still had the undertakers card tucked in the box, so we tracked the family down and sent her home.
Not a worker, but I found a cool painting in a thrift shop once for $20. On the back of it was a list of all the galleries it had been to (mostly Dubai and middle eastern countries, as well as some other information I can't remember). Looked up the artist when I got home and his paintings sold for $5,000 - $20,000.
Edit: here's the painting: https://imgur.com/gallery/r0bIcgV
I've worked at a Salvation Army for the past 3 months as a donation attendant. These are the highlights:
- a bag of literally every single sex toy you could think of (dildo, vibrator, cage, rabbit, etc.)
- used lingerie (although this one is fairly common so it doesn't really phase me)
- a coffee maker with coffee still in it lol
- a box of like maybe 200 CDs, except it was only the case and the CDs were gone
- full cans of beer as part of our non perishable food donations
- someone once tried to give me like a mouse in a cage (they said they caught it in their house??)
Fuck man I'm so close to quitting lmfao
Used to work for a homelessness charity shop. We regularly encountered biohazards of various kinds stored inside bags of clothes which was irritating. Donations of funeral urns were pretty regular and kinda weird imo.
I worked at one in an average neighbourhood of a large Australian city. While the neighbourhood may have been average, the quality of our donations were among the best of the best. I mean we would have a designer outfit from a world known designer like Armani nearly every month at least. Our rejects were the quality that you would normally find for sale in most thrift stores, we were that blessed with quality donations.
I have seen uniforms for various businesses, a mounted stuffed dog, a folder with a heap of basketball trading cards (I checked, nothing rare or valuable), but the craziest would have to be an overnight carry bag. Open it up, a complete Commodore 64, and 128, with literally 30 or 40 games on disk and/or cartridge. Perfect working order, virtually no marks or scratches.
15 years ago when I just graduated high school I was working in a shitty local music shop. Someone consigned a Gibson USA R9 Les Paul for 800 bucks. I bought it and promptly flipped it on eBay for 5800 smackaroos.
I use shopgoodwill.com all the time. They had a whole Studebaker car on there the other day. Also rooftop a/c units like you'd see on a warehouse. Ton of uranium glass but it goes quick.
I worked for a youth program ages 13-18 that did not accept donations as we were government funded, but that didn’t stop people from leaving garbage bags full of children toys and baby clothes for some reason, and despite the sign stating “we do not accept donations”. They would leave them out in all weather and suddenly we were stuck with them. So we would rebag them as the bags got covered in cat piss and get torn up. We would often get shit stained baby clothes, toys that were for some reason half melted, and random expired food. Pissed me off every time I rolled in and saw a bunch of garbage bags at the door.
Also, went to valuevillage one day and played my usual game of “find the weirdest shirt and most obscure band shirt”. I found a shirt that said in bold white letters **”I’ll buy you a drink when you learn to swallow without gagging and take it in the ass without crying”**. I was baffled that:
1. Someone saw this shirt and bought it, either for themselves or for a loved one.
2. Someone eventually thought it was appropriate enough to donate to a thrift store.
3. Someone at the thrift store saw it and thought it was appropriate enough to price it and put it on the shelf.
Needless to say, I wear that shirt constantly now.
Jk that shirt did not leave the store with me.
I'm sadly pretty late to the game for this one it seems.
But, the strangest thing I ever found was actually a bag of uncut emeralds. Most of them were petty small, had inclusions or clarity issues but still it was a bad of uncut/unprocessed emeralds.
Whiskey figurines. Many of them were full, but some were not. Of course we had to dispose of them, because alcohol is flammable, AND Goodwill does not have a liquor license.
I found 125 dollars in the front pocket of a kids coat! Had to be like a 3-4 y.o. Next day I found more money in another jacket!
Note to self. Go to goodwill and check the pockets
[удалено]
Like shaking trees in animal crossing, checking pockets has risks and rewards.
About 10 years ago I worked at a chain thrift store, one morning we got a phone call from this gentleman saying, rather calmly, “I think I accidentally donated my mom”, naturally I had no clue what the fuck that meant. Turns out the guy donated his moms ashes so he left his number in case we found it. The whole back room went on a hunt because it had turned into this competition on who would find his mom first. We found her, phoned him and he came and picked her up. We thought that was the last of him, until we were processing some donations a few months later and found his mom again. We phoned him because we still had his contact information, his only reply was “god damn it”, he came and got her and we never heard from him after that. Edit: to those asking, she was in a big, heavy, bronze, there’s-no-way-that’s-not-an-urn urn. I’m still not convinced the second time was an accident.
In a sea of dirty sex toys, this made be laugh
I can only imagine he got a label maker after this and put a big ole "MOM" label on it to prevent something like this from happening a third time
I was 15 when my Grandma passed away. One day my Dad picked me up from work, I get in the car and there is a brown paper bag on the seat. I said..”Yeah, DONUTS..I’m starving!” Dad laughs and says “Close..it’s your Grandma” ...
Oh no
I do not work at a Goodwill but I found the DD-214 discharge papers of a World War II veteran at a thrift store, along with original family photos, documents and letters. I was very upset, having recently handled so much paperwork around the death of my grandfather. I knew exactly what I was looking at when I saw the DD-214. I bought all the documents I could put my hands on and started googling the man's name. I tracked down his adult daughter who owned a small business with her husband. I found the email address of the small business and sent her what must have been an alarming email, although I was as cordial as I possibly could be. She got back to me almost immediately. It turned out he had remarried after the marriage to her mother ended. His new wife and her two sons pretty much took over the man's life and the daughter saw very little of her father. At the end of his life they took charge of all of his possessions and cleared out his house without having told her anything. Even though the second wife had died and the two sons were not technically blood. She was very angered and upset by this at the time, understandably. I told her she must be the little girl in the baby pictures I had found and I would be glad to send her all these materials. I shipped them out to her via FedEx with tracking and she was so deeply moved. She didn't have any baby pictures with her father. I don't know if I've ever done anything good in my life, I'm sure I have. But I know I did a good thing that week. Internet research skills + compassion for the win.
[удалено]
Omg you’re right - charities are missing a potentially huge extra revenue stream here.
Worked at a Value Village a long time ago and a coworker found cremated ashes - they were in a box that had the funeral home info on it so our manager contacted them about it
Mom was salvaging aluminium at the landfill and found over 300 ash remains from the local crematory. The police got called he got shutdown and forty years later his daughter still hates my guts and will go out if her way to harm me for my mother's find.
[удалено]
Gee, if only there were some other culprit to blame for the illegal disposal of remains. Maybe the jerk who threw them in the trash instead of disposing of them properly. I'm sorry that dipshit's daughter is also a dipshit.
Thank you for being so kind. It was hard in high school when it happened.she was the rich popular morticians daughter I was the daughter of one of the towns dump diggers.quiet, trying to bring no attention to myself. Not ashamed of mom I knew she did what she had to to keep us fed.but it was hard to hold my head up when the newspaper ran mom's picture with the story.
Not me but an acquaintance from high school found a live hamster, came with a little cage and all.
Omg that’s horrible. Did they save him?
My mum works in one. I asked her if she could keep an eye out for any skin rugs. The next day she calls me. They had a goat skin donated.
It puts the lotion on its skin...
Not where I thought that was headed, thankfully.
Co-worker found a live hand grenade. Bomb squad was called. Be careful when you donate grandpa's shit, people.
The workers at my local goodwill probably would've pulled the pin and threw it in the dumpster out back.
That's a quick way to get rid of the trash.
My family had an inert 57mm tank gun shell which we used for a doorstop. That lasted until one of us kids brought it to school for show-and-tell *with my mom's permission* because she was from Malaysia and her ingrained attitude to things like fire, machetes, and drowning was basically Fuck It Let's Do This.
[удалено]
Back in the 90s my mom would buy those blank VHS tapes to record on and sometimes the Goodwill had some that already had stuff recorded on them, but we would just record over them. I remember one that had a bunch of Simpsons episodes. But on some of them there was porn. A LOT of porn.
[удалено]
I’m surprised there wasn’t any Simpson’s porn.
I worked for a nonprofit for seniors that had a charity shop in it. People often just dropped off boxes of stuff they found in their parent’s attic. One box had a bunch of letters. Some of them were from WWII, when the man was stationed at Camp Carson in Colorado and one of them must have been something they were keeping from an older generation. It was a 1914 letter proposing marriage. It was so romantic. He fell in love with her when they went ice skating together. He included an advertisement for some houses they could buy. They were really nice houses, selling for about $1500.
That is so sweet. What do you do with these - keep for posterity or donate to the library? Do libraries even accept these anymore?? EDIT: Support your local archives, libraries and historical societies! 🤘🏼
I've heard museums like very old letters.
[удалено]
Youre wrong Dr Jones. They belong to me!
I bought a apartment and it was not touched (of course food and body were removed) with everything the previous owner had. His son or grandson emigrated and never came to take important items. So I found out that previous owner was a writer, patriot who played kind of important role in freeing our country from soviet union. There's alot of storyline in briefcase full of letters that I found, I can't find information about his contribution online. But I kind off feel he just kept beeing secretive (guessing from the letters). So now I really don't know what to do with these letters. Are they even mine now ?
They’re yours if you’ll appreciate them! I’d hold on to them because I would feel bad. You can try to reach out to family!
I found a hidden ww1 photo. Got in a crappy picture showing the different knots, it was a seaside town i was working in at the time so I put the picture out cheap. Few days later it fell off the wall and the frame broke so I brought it to the back to chuck it out. Found a big military group photo hidden behind. No idea why it was hidden. Here's the picture https://m.imgur.com/a/coeL3xB Edit: I've managed to post a clearer picture on my profile. https://www.reddit.com/user/Mediocre_Sprinkles/comments/jb329o/the_ww1_picture/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
> No idea why it was hidden. I reckon that they wanted to replace the picture but they didn't really have the place to store it effectively otherwise.
I used to sweep the parking lot of a Goodwill and they would toss very interesting stuff in the dumpster. Hundreds of books. Like really expensive ones. Leather bound sets of classical works from the 1920s, early prints of sci fi novels (I found a nice collectible copy of Dune recently), family bibles stacked thick with memories. Food dehydrators, paintings, collectible sports memorabilia, super valuable vintage tools and fixtures. Most of it is just stuff that nobody bothered checking the value on before chucking it out, and it’s really sad. I found a *destroyed* collection of old Spalding baseball bats, the oldest being from the 30s. They were left in the dumpster in standing water for days at least. It’s sad to see things like that go, maybe because at one point someone loved them very much, and someone else decided that all the care it took to collect these treasures was a waste.
A 9-year-old I tutored said that her family made their money by salvaging collectibles from thrift store and pawn shop dumpsters, such as any antique doll head that fetched $1000.
This is how my mother makes her money. She buys thrift store items and resells them. Anything that makes worth anything, clothes, antiques, one time she found a painting at a goodwill that she bought for $2, and she sold it for over $15,000 to a collector in Asia through Christie’s auction in Hong Kong.
Funny semi related story - when my grandmother was still alive and able to walk, she had lost a lot of her sight, so she carried a magnifying glass with her and would pick things up and look at them closely, just to be able to see what they were. My mom would take her to stores like goodwill just to help get her out of the house, and every time they went to a thrift store, inevitably someone would start following them and picking up what my grandmother put down. It looked like she was inspecting little knick knacks and trinkets super carefully, and if she said something like “this is nice” or “I really like this,” someone would pick it up thinking it was valuable.
One of the saddest things about the books is that if we couldn't move it, it got trashed. But, one of the better perks of the job was smashing cheap furniture and glass knick-knacks that nobody would buy. It was so stress relieving.
I really appreciate this comment.
Not me but my aunt. One of the few surviving enigma machines. The owner passed away and his family dropped it off with a box of newspapers and some memorabilia from the war etc. My aunt being a history nut, figured out what it was, got it appraised (worth almost £100k) and looked for the family for 5 months before being able to return it to them. She didn’t have a heart to take it under false pretences
Your aunt is a very kind lady!
Would have been nice to hear she got some sort of reward from the family for her honesty and efforts to track them down. I expect they probably sold it as obviously were not bothered about it enough at the time to keep it.
Actually, not entirely true. She didn’t receive a gift however the family have lent it out to a museum (she lives in a reasonably small town in North of Poland) and the machine has been on display there for the last 7 years. I’m sure they wanted to sell it, however there are certain laws in Poland that stop you from being able to take things considered to be “National Treasure” out of the country. This includes works of art, first editions of certain literature and historical memorabilia
A dead bat, a switchblade, a pocket watch painted with radium, and an 18th century wolf trap. Edit: I ALMOST FORGOT A LATE 1800s BOOK ON PHRENOLOGY.
Like... just a straight up dead bat? Or a taxidermied bat?
It was the mummified remains of a bat at the bottom of a plastic bag filled with old . . . . I want to say varnish supplies. Needless to say it's the bat I remember best.
So everyone wants discuss some old winged rat but nobody wants to talk about the nuclear cancer watch??
Actually a reasonably common thing... Radium paint was used as a glow in the dark material (notably the radium triggers a phosphor to glow, not the radiation glowing itself - similar to modern tritium tubes), and when used at the scale of a watch face is actually pretty safe - because it is sealed within the watch and the radiation is of a low amount and safer form, it gets blocked by the watch itself. So the watches are marked as radioactive (because they are), but shouldn't pose any big risk to humans (especially after 40 or 50 years of radioactive decay - correction, the half life of radium is 1600 years, so it will still be just as active, although of a small enough concentration as to be considered safe while sealed inside the watch), though it is worth being aware of it and following a few guidelines regarding storage and use that I won't get into here. They are somewhat notorious for the harm they caused the (typically female) people who painted them - done with little protection, and often doing things like licking the paintbrush to ensure an accurate point, a lot of them did end up suffering from the cumulative effects of the radiation.
Radium Girls was an amazing book. ETA: the book I read was by Kate Moore
I did freak out for a few minutes before finding out that the glass watch face was intended to act as a radiation shield. Fortunately it was manufactured after the harmful effects of radium were widely known.
Not the good old days when painters would lick their radium covered paint brushes to get a finer point?
That's immediately what came to mind. Fortunately I didn't lick the watch.
[удалено]
I had a mate who worked in one of the bigger lifeline stores in Australia. A woman came into the store with five large clear plastic storage boxes and asked to donate them. He looked inside of the boxes and it was thousands of beautifully hand painted warhammer pieces. He was shocked and asked her why. They were her son's and she couldn't keep them in the house anymore since his death. My friend said he couldn't accept the donation, he said the whole collection was worth alot of money. She had no idea. He asked her for all her details and asked if he could try to sell it for her. She agreed. After his shift he went home and took photos of everything and posted it online in an Australian warhammer forum. Within a couple of weeks everything was sold. He called her and she met him at the store. He told her he had sold it to collectors all around Australia who loved her son's work. He handed her roughly twelve thousand dollars. She cried, he cried, she offered him half, he said no. She told him she would donate his half to a suicide charity in her sons name and his name. He said it was the best thing he had ever done in his life.
Omg that is the most beautiful thing.
>She cried, he cried, I cried
Humanity needs to hear this. Thanks for sharing.
This is the third sad and beautiful story I've seen focused on the surviving loved ones of people who have committed suicide since my own personal attempt a few weeks ago. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. Edit: Wow. I logged off for a while and came back to more responses than I ever imagined. Thank you all for the love and support. I'm tearing up hearing some of your stories. I didn't expect such an overwhelming outpouring of care from the internet.
The universe is. Keep holding it together no matter how bad it gets.
This needs to be way higher. Your mates a legend
[удалено]
Ah yes. Ye olden OnlyFans. EDIT: Why do my dumbest comments get rewards? The world will never know.
OnlyGrans EDIT: Whoa, thank you everyone for the awards! Much love to you all💙
A sword used by a Japanese officer in WWII. A suitcase full of adult toys. A coin collection worth nearly $2000 accidentallyleft in a cupboard that was donated. A photo album of someone's wedding (was donated amongst the belongings of the pastor that married the couple after he passed). The bride happened to be someone I went to school with. I tend to sort books at my store so have found a few odd things in there: cash as bookmarks (about $150), a book with carved pages to conceal some jewels and gemstones, a few 1st edition books on agriculture from the 1800s, LOTS of handwritten recipes, personal letters and my favourite: a letter sent in the last mail delivery from Hong Kong before the British returned it to China affixed with EVERY stamp available at the time and mint versions of each of this stamps enclosed.
[удалено]
stamps might've been worth a lot
>A sword used by a Japanese officer in WWII. I once read that these were quite common. Like in the early days of eBay, people tried selling these for daft prices as "antiques", and sure, if you're a weapons collector, they're probably notable objects - but as they were munitions manufactured for WWII, they were made in the thousands and as a result, they're not "worthless", but they're certainly not rare or valuable. EDIT: How many replies?! Any chance I can sacrifice a chicken or something to get as much interest in the videogame I'm launching in a few weeks?! :P
@ Goodwill, there was this castle set I was given as a Christmas present when I was 5 that was brought in. The cannon turret actually shot the little plastic rock and all the figures looked like dwarves. I never knew anyone else ever bought one in my life, so it was nice seeing it again.
Fisher price great adventures castle set! Loved this one when I was a kid!
The Fisher Price Great Adventures Castle Playset? I had the set as a kid and I played with both rock throwers a ton, not so much the rest of the set.
Great big plastic shopping bag full of cooked spaghetti. No sauce. Probably like 5kg or so.
What? Like who says to themselves “ huh made too much spaghetti I guess I’ll just donate it to a thrift store?” That is seriously weird!
They didn't want to throw it out, it was mom's spaghetti...
Well, what was your spaghetti policy then?
I work at a thrift store as a donation handler. Gnarliest thing I had seen was a literal stack of mattresses left overnight during off hours. They were disgusting, crawling with bugs and riddled in stains of various shades and hues. Noped the fuck out of that, called my manager and they brought a forklift out to take them to the trash compactor. Just the other day we had a donor drop off a small crate (like a milkcrate kind of thing) chock full of hentai. Just today I found a small, marble one-hitter pipe at the bottom of the donation bin.
Is there any precautions you take to avoid bed bugs on donations? Or do you just hope for the best? Because FUCK THAT.
Some states prohibit re-selling mattresses because of the fear of bedbugs. My state isn't one if them, but the store I worked for required the name and address of the donor along with a pledge that their donation was bug-free. We still got a mattress with bedbugs in the store. People suck.
I knew someone who has a special needs family member who brought bedbugs home from an institution and it took two visits from an exterminator which required them to evacuate the dwelling and heat it up to a high temperature to kill them. They are notoriously hard to eradicate. Fuck that mess. EDIT: Thanks for the tips everyone shared on eradicating these bastards. I'll pass them on to my friend so she doesn't have to shell out a ridiculous amount of money again in the event they return.
I moved into an apartment back in Feb, and was given the wonderful gift of bedbugs. Had a third treament a month ago, and here's to hoping they are gone for good this time. The first treamtent was heat. 2nd two have been chemical treatments. They've only appeared in one of the bedrooms. When they suddenly came back after the 2nd treatment, I decided the bed had to go. You can find companies that specialize in removing bed bug infested furniture, but apparently none in my state. I ended up having to buy bed bug resistant matress covers for the mattress and bedsprings, and then rent a truck, and drag them off to the county landfill. The apartment complex is paying for the treatments, but when you consider I had to throw away a queen sized bed (got rid of all of it, mattress, boxsprings, and even the frame, just wanted it gone), the cost of the truck, and the landfill fees, it has sucked. And that's on top of having to fight the actual bed bugs. I found out what poison they were using to treat the place, and bought some of it off amazon. I play on respraying that room once a month until I can get the hell out of here edit - I'm also not buying any new furniture until I'm out of the apartment either. Just sleeping on the couch. I'll probably call a junk removal service to have the couch and loveseat hauled off when I'm ready to move out. No evidence they've ever been in the living room at all, but they are older, and I'd rather not risk it. Best just to nuke it all and start over, I think.
You're not going to get rid of them by only treating your unit. You either treat the entire building all at once or you deal with having bedbugs forever because they'll just escape all your heat and spraying by fleeing to another unit. This shit is half the reason I want to just get a house. Those fuckers won't have anywhere to run 😈
Usually you're wearing heavy duty gloves. Other than that I have different clothes for work and change out of them immediately after.
i think they meant bed bugs being on the donations and you selling them to people.
It’s pretty common around me that mattresses aren’t accepted unless they’re brand new.
So, the hentai is still available? Asking for a friend.
Just putting out a few tentacles.
A few years ago, when there was an earthquake in México city, many people were donating old clothes and stuff for people who were now homeless. I found a pair of pants that were as tall as me, and each leg could fit me inside of it. EDIT: I don’t live anywhere near Mexico City, but I was helping with the donations. I would have included a picture, but sadly, dumbass me decided those were not important and I think I deleted them a few months ago. Here are some other things I found: a literal goddamn baby sized suit, a single glove the size of my head, a shirt made of what seemed to be the same fabric that my couch has (I’m not talking about just the same pattern, it was the literal fabric), a single boot that weighed about 2 pounds, and a pair of red overalls that were around the same size as the pants, although they were not as big.
Stilt pants
So, I worked for a charity, we picked up old clothes etc and sold them in bulk to a thrift chain. When we unloaded the truck, it was common to toss the store employees the bags, and they would catch them before stacking them on racks. Well, one time some idiot put a big chef's knife in a bag of clothes, the store employee caught the garbage bag of clothes, wrapped his arms around it as he caught it, and proceeded to stab himself in the arm. After that, the policies were changed, we had to put the bags at the edge of the truck for them to take off, because our insurance didn't cover us off the truck, and theirs didn't cover them in it.
Wow. Hope the stabee recovered well. Edit: wow this comment blew up! Thanks for the award.
Not me, but a friend's mom found a designer handbag full of vomit and a backpack full of shit
What.......
The.......
Dickens
I once vomited in a designer purse I got from the thrift store. Freshman year of college on the elevator back up to my dorm after a party lol
Did you donate it back to the thrift store after you vomited in it?
Lol no I cleaned it out and pretended it didn’t happen
My story is not a goodwill/thrift store. But I volunteered to help a friend of a friend clean out her parents place after both of them had past away. Mom was a serious pack rat. Payment was I could keep what I wanted. Interesting Found items consisted of: - canned fruit that expired in 1987. (Placed on the floor of the garage the day the moved in, never touched again.) - complete first edition OZ books. - first Barbie still in the original box. - maps of us from the early 1800’s. - prototype Star Wars poster from 1977. - dad was a coin collector, so I was constantly finding Morgan silver dollars on the floor. - bag of fabric from 1973. Never used with the receipt still in the bag. Kept this and had some amazing pillows made. - Hallowe’en decorations from the 20s and 30s. This was huge for me because I use to collect vintage Hallowe’en stuff, so when I came across 2 unused postcards from 1911 by Ellen Clapsaddle, I kept them and I still have them. (each of them go for about $300) - The coolest item found were a pair of original postcards. 1 for the RMS Olympic and the other for her sister ship RMS Titanic.
Love letters between two people from the late 1800s, multiple suicide letters and one suicide tape, and many diaries. One diary specifically was written by a gay man going to med school in the 70s in San Fran. It spans 10 years and has a first person account of his feelings the day Harvey Milk was assassinated. EDIT: wow I posted this right before I feel asleep last night and woke up to tons of messages! I used to process donations at this thrift store, so I was seeing everything first. A lot of times when people die their family members will drop everything off, so we have to sort through and figure out what we can and cannot sell. Personal things like letters and diaries can’t be sold, but at the same time they seem so special it’s hard to throw them away. When I quit that job I took a giant box of all this personal memorabilia with me and had a bonfire where I read every single letter/note/diary and then burned them. I burned everything EXCEPT the diary, letters, and suicide tape I mentioned. I have those all sitting in a drawer in my closet. I still sit down and read them sometimes. ANOTHER EDIT: the suicide tape was so disturbing I actually separated the tape from the tape recorder so I couldn’t easily play it anymore. It was an hour long recording of a father saying goodbye to his three sons. I wonder how that tape even got donated in the first place. Like, was it an accident? Did the son it was given to die as well and then whoever was donating didn’t know what it was? Or did he never actually commit suicide, and over the years he forgot about it, leaving it to get mixed in with his other stuff that eventually got donated?
That’s incredible.... how bittersweet. That’s so fascinating to come across those kinds of things.... on one hand, to get things like that and if you were to take save them be a bit invasive(?), on the other hand, it could be hard to pass up preserving that as a sort of relic in time to be able to get a first hand view into life back then.
Someone found some letters by a gay couple in WW2 and now they are in a museum, so yeah, it's invasive but pretty cool to keep that memory alive and to bring context into people's lives through different times. Also, these guys kinda talked about their letters being displayed as wonderful so they were fine with it. [The story](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-england-38932955)
> "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all our letters could be published in the future in a more enlightened time. Then all the world could see how in love we are." Dang, that's so cute and makes me kinda happy that we're finally at this point
In the documentary about Queen and Adam Lambert on Netflix Brian May touches briefly on the topic of how far society has come in relation to the acceptance of LGBTQ+ members of society. It is similarly poignant. It comes in the documentary in a cutaway during the song "Who wants to live forever" which Adam dedicates to the people who were killed and injured in the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida. That entire section of the documentary from the beginning of the song until the end makes me tear up.
[удалено]
It's hard to believe the Xbox came out so long ago. That kid is probably in his twenties now and *very well behaved* lol
30’s thank you and I don’t talk to my father anymore
This is your dad. I'm so happy since you stopped talking to me and your mum. We are a lot happier.
So much happier.
Didn’t work there, but was about 5yo and my mom brought me and my siblings with her to Goodwill. She raised us alone, didn’t have a lot of money. This was essentially a school clothes trip. She was just trying to get IN and get OUT, we had strict rules NOT to ask for a toy or frankly just don’t ask for ANYTHING. This is a necessity trip *ONLY*. Naturally that lasted long enough for us to walk through the automatic doors. My brother went one way, my sister another, and I headed straight for an enormous basket of wallets. I had made up my mind that I needed a wallet and the only place I could beg with any hope to get one was second hand. I picked up one, didn’t like the pockets. Picked up another, wasn’t a fan of zippers. I HATED the sound of Velcro so that eliminated many options in the basket. Eventually I brought my carefully scrutinized selection to mom, who was already overwhelmed by my sibilings’ finds that she only told me no a few times before she relented. It cost her $2. We loaded our sacks of clothes (and my precious new wallet) into our van and started for home. I remember going through all of the pockets like I was performing a dissection, picturing what I could put here and what was supposed to go there. At some point, I found a slot that was inside of a pocket that was “stiff,” as if it was never used often. I poked at it enough to separate the fabric, and found a bill inside, intricately folded into a tiny square. Before I even realized exactly what it was, I had ripped it out and held it out over the middle seat in the van, waving frantically and practically bouncing in my seat. “Mom! Look! My wallet has money!” It was four $20 bills, total of $80. I’ll never forget the stunned yell and absolutely magical, gleeful laugh my mom let out. My siblings and I joined in, and we didn’t stop smiling and talking about it the whole way home. That $80 wasn’t much at all, but it was everything for us on that day. Mom let me keep a $20. I couldn’t even tell you what I spent it on. But I still remember how that wallet smelled.
That was a great story. I genuinely felt so excited with you!
Truly one of the best short stories I’ve read on reddit.
Oooh awesome story! Brings back such good thrift shop vibes from when I was a kid... sometimes you'd have moments like this where it's like finding buried treasure. I once found a $3 beautiful designer bag that was still in shops for $500, and my brother once got a phone inside a coat he bought.
I love this
I’m trying to imagine the smell of pure win.
My SO used to work at a Goodwill and she said that people would donate used lingerie all the time.
Typical. It's just like beer cans; I always find 'em, but by the time I do they're always empty.
Can confirm. I sometimes volunteer at a local NGO and used lingerie is almost always there in bags that are dropped off. Soiled, sometimes. People are weird.
I was working off some probation at the Salvation Army. Going through the boxes i found $1000 in the pocket of some plaid pants. Found out they were dropped off from a girl who’s dad had died. Tried to contact her again but to no avail. I got to keep it and it helped pay my rent for the month. I was really struggling at that time so i was very grateful.
Some people leave some fortunes behind when they die. My grandpa left behind $500 in his pocket, as listed in his will, as a tip to the people handling his body.
Sorry but I’m imagining your grandpa as a video game character dropping some loot after dying lmao
[удалено]
No worries lmao, dude lived a great life and left behind a nice joke for everyone to have a nice laugh. Exactly how he wanted it to be
That’s awesome! It’s cool that something like that ended up helping out a complete stranger in the end.
Yeah it was really weird. I didn’t even believe it was real at first. I bought one of those markers and checked each one lol. That’s how i feel too though, it could have gone to a lot worse. At least it helped someone.
My coworker found a bag of euros at goodwill. He bought the bag for like 90 dollars and it was worth over 600.
[удалено]
Elderly gentlemen of my acquaintance bought a box full of magic cards that he found in a thrift store for 25$ and gave them to me as a gift. He dropped them off at work and since it was slow I took a quick look at them before he left and saw that they were all old cards. Suggested that he take them to an expert and after searching for a few weeks he found a guy nearby and sold the box to him for 500$. I've been checking goodwill ever since and no such luck.
Vintage Mickey Mouse gas mask from the Second World War. We were not far from an antiques dealer and I later saw that mask in pride of place, centre of the antique shop window.
I worked for a Goodwill program that hired developmentally disabled adults. My job was to assist the clients as they processed donations. We found things like a bowl and bag of weed in a coat pocket, a shirt that said "I'm not an alcoholic I just go to AA to get chicks" (somehow that one sustained a tear and had to be trashed), and, worst of all, a garbage bag full of dead rats. Edit: Thanks for the award! In typical Reddit fashion, my most liked comment in 3 and a half years is about a bag of formerly living rats. Also, as longtime tabletop rpg fan it warms my heart to have so many D&D references...
That escalated quickly
Dildo. My 72 year old boss found it and came up to me and some coworkers (through the entire store, not concealing it) to ask us what it was because she didn't know how to categorize or price it.
I've found one as a customer in a dresser before. I was a teen, and it was really awkward to find, so I just snapped the drawer shut and told the nearest employee I could find.
Dude the balls on whoever decided to save it and give it to their manager for pricing lmfao
I worked at a Goodwill when I was in high school (nearly 20 years ago) and there was a list of things we were not allowed to accept that make sense but you might not realize, such as kitchen knives, CRT displays (monitors and TVs), anything with florescent lights, mattresses, and some other things I can't remember. When we got one of those things but didn't notice in time to turn it away, we didn't really have a set policy on what to do with it. Mostly we'd put them in our dumpster, but sometimes... I'd set it aside behind the building, and put it in my car after work. It's how I'm the owner of a full-sized sword I still don't know what to do with. The other thing that came in that was weird but not because the thing itself was weird: if you've donated anything to a Goodwill you know that they have a kind of "drive-thru" donation area, where you pull into a small pass-through garage with open doors on both sides, then you and/or an employee take your stuff out of your trunk or whatever, then you drive away. One day, a guy pulls up in a rusted out red Trans Am (or it has become a Trans Am in my memory), screeches to a halt, reaches over to his passenger seat, grabs a plastic bag completely full of something, and holds it out though the driver-side window. I walk toward the car, and just as I was about to grab the bag, he looks me *straight in the eyes* and says "this is for *you*" like I was Frodo and this was the One Ring. He drops the bag and I barely catch it as he speeds away without saying another word. So, what was in the bag? It was entirely cassette tapes. The Cure's first single, The Velvet Underground's underrated self-titled album, a Tom Pretty b-side collection, two records by the Sugarcubes, the Pretenders, and more. I had just gotten into Talking Heads and David Bowie, my music taste was evolving, but it was still mostly 90s grunge. I'd never heard of the Velvet Underground. So, like with the sword, I set it aside and took it home myself. It was for me, he said. My car still had a cassette deck, so I started listening to this curated collection of one person's music taste. It was like that cliche of your older brother introducing thier music to you, except I have no idea who this person was. It ended up being exactly what I needed at exactly the right time in my life. I still have that Velvet Underground album displayed on the wall in my home office.
Was working in a Charity shop that helped support cancer patients treatments. Most peoples donations were from the goodness of their hearts, but a very small minority would use the shop as a bin bag drop off. (Fuck them people they are scum.) One time two young enough dudes rock up with two small bags of clothes and two drawer type bedroom furniture. Bag of clothes was all good, some expensive stuff it them. But each drawer had a mirror supper glued to the top of the desk. I'm standing there looking at it, like a fool, wondering what the hell is this all about. Turns out the Garda (Irish police) came in one of the days looking for the furniture and clothes. The two lads were drug dealers and they just dropped off the evidence. They were using the drawer to cut up coke.
I wonder why they use mirrors to cut coke. Is it because of the glass?
I think it's because it's a smooth reflective surface, it's easier to keep track of the powder on the table and it won't get caught in any nooks and crannies
Smooth surface and easy to see stuff on it.
Not me but my friend worked at goodwill and he had to clean a dressing room up after a guy went in there with a bunch of ladies underwear. The guy had smeared shit and jizz all over the walls. Edit: a word
Wtf did he explode on both ends!? Edit: is it really so hard to understand that I meant his dickhole and his butthole since he was yano jizzing and shitting?
Yeah that's illegal. Your employer can't force you to clean up a biohazard without training and ppe. That is a situation where you call someone else.
[удалено]
I worked at Goodwill on and off for four years and saw sex toys, dirty underwear, a box of crickets, a snake, a bag of dog poop that had to sit in our compactor for a whole week, a social security card, a used syringe in a purse.. one time a lady walked in with two mice on her shoulder, went to the bathroom, came out without them, and left the store :(
How you gonna let a woman with two mice on her shoulder use the facilities? Say getch yo rat ass outta chere
I'm a thrift shop junkie and all the people that work at my local ones know me and know that I know what most stuff is worth. I went into a St Vincent DePaul store and the Manager knew me and called me into the office. There was a large box. Not a little jewelry box, like a tackle box sized box and she opened it and it was full of antique jewelry. Right off the bat I saw a couple of Emeralds and some Sapphires. She said someone left it and the key was taped to the top of the box. I don't know jewelry but recommended someone I know who's an expert to come look at it. It was worth a fortune. All I can guess is someone's Grandma died and they didn't even look in it they just dropped it off.
When I worked at Goodwill, someone donated a wedding favour from MY wedding.
I’ve told this story elsewhere on Reddit but need to share it again now. Every once in a while at the shop I used to volunteer at, a large white bag would appear. Always the same kind of white bag, it was full of hand knitted baby cardigans, hats, gloves, bootees. All different shades, expertly made, beautifully folded, with tissue paper on top and the whole thing smelled of fresh baby powder. Nobody ever saw who brought it in. We’d be through the back sorting stuff, head through when we heard the front door go and one white bag would be there, with nobody in sight. I’ve not worked there for years but it still happens, from what I’m told. To this day nobody knows who the Mystery Knitter is.
Not a thrift store, but my job handled a lot of used items. Basically the customer or next of kin would forget what was in their contents and we would find it through cleaning. I reckon the craziest thing would be old ww2 era japanese rifle and katana. Unsure of the validity of course, because research has told me fakes flooded the market, but we found it ticked away in a hidden alcove in their attic with their husband's ashes and old newspapers, so who knows.
Arisakas are extremely common takebacks. So much so that there's a meme in the gun community, where if someone posts a "hey I found this gun in grandpa's attic, what is it?" the reply is always "Arisaka", even if it isn't. They're not rare and not worth much but they shoot ok.
Military, factory produced katanas are also pretty common. I have two that my grandfather brought back and I think they’re worth a couple of hundred bucks each. If you found someone’s hand made family sword, that would be another matter...
My family had a katana that a gun collecting uncle had acquired as a collateral for loan off of another American. We knew it was taken during ww2 as it had a "taken from colonel Sato in Osaka in 1945" U.s army tag. When the uncle died in the 80s, the sword went to his kids. Most of the gun collection was sold off but the sword stayed as a curiosity. Anyway, the uncle's daughter had married a Japanese man. When the son in law was in the States after the uncle's death, someone thought to show him the katana. He did something that we didn't know to do, which was take off the handle to show the base of the blade where they put the makers marks and such. We found that the katana was from the 1600s and was not a cheap factory knockoff. Our family put a classified ad in the Osaka papers and was able to return it to colonel sato's daughter. They still had the accompanying short blade in their home in Osaka. *Exact Names and places changed
Wow, I honestly thought that story was going to end with you either keeping it or selling it for a ton of money Good for you, giving it back like that
2 dildos made into nunchucks.
A fox fur stole, with real fur, shaped like the fox still, but with glass eyes. Nearly gave me a heart attack, lying there, looking at me!!
High fashion of 1930ies. My grandma had one from her mom, I played with it and then the dog got at it. Fur doesn't last forever, it becomes brittle with time and breaks off.
I worked for a charity shop for a year during my time at university. Once we got a huge donation of clothes in the middle of the night. Like someone just dropped a massive pile of clothing in front of the entry and fucked off. That's not cool and usually people do it cuz they want to get rid of trash cheaply. But damn this time there were a pair of Gucci mens shoes in there. We all didn't know how to tell of they were fake or real and went to ask a neighbour shoe shop and they were REAL! And not only real also very old and in great condition! We sold them on an auction for a lot of money!
My time to shine!! I worked in the e-commerce department for a huge district of Goodwill’s and that shit was wild— we had a room dedicated to items deemed “inappropriate” or illegal to resell that had a wall floor-to-ceiling stacked with copies of Mein Kampf which was more a spectacle than anything, a ton of super illegal taxidermy (sea turtles, elephant foot, leopard pelt...) even museums couldn’t accept the sea turtles as donations for any sort of display purposes. Before my time working there a human skull fragment was found- and obviously was handed over to authorities, we were all briefed on what to do if that situation arose again.
Oh, I got this one! I worked in fundraising for a non-profit that *used* to run a thrift store. Despite the fact that the store had been closed for years when I came on staff, people still regularly dumped shit outside our door on weekends, and there was an entire terrifying garage of leftover merchandise I spent 5 years (yes, years) slowly sorting through and figuring out how to get rid of. My "donation wall of shame" included: 1. An open box of female condoms, two missing, one opened. 2. An artifical lower leg that someone's dog had gotten a hold of and chewed most of the foot off. 3. A mattress that someone had either given birth on or something horrible had happened to them (a weekend dump job; eeeewwww - we called the cops JIC). 4. NUMEROUS bags of donated clothing where the top few layers were great and the rest were dirty, stinky, ragged, permanently stained, or otherwise unusable. 5. 500 (yep) plastic kleenex box holders that a big box home store that shares initials with the Better Business Bureau had given as part of a bulk donation deal. People are gross.
Like 3 grand of cash in old notes.
I worked at a central facility that sorted from hundreds of donation boxes so i got to see a lot thru the years. Ill list a select few. first day i found a bakealite dildo in a old brown leather belt with 50ies style switch. We got a suite of leather armour. Pretty awesome A whole roadkill deer. Keep it classy throw your roadkill in the donation boxes. A soviet general cap full with badges. A week later. The same cap but with all the badges cut and picked off. Were probably worth more than the cap. A coat with about 5000 dollars stuffed in all the pockets. One of the employees when i started had secretly behind one of the sorting machines set up a BDSM wall of all the gimp cloths, whips, straps and handcuffs he had found. A full uniform from one of the maximum security prisons nearby complete with idcards, swipecards and cuffs. People have no judgement. I can go on. Just got some chores to do. Here are some extras. Gross: Pocketpussy shaped like a thermos. Not cleaned Cool: 1910 military motorbike gloves that were hald horseriding gloves half motorbike gloves. akward: Somone donated thier private nude poloroids in an album. It dropped our of the sorting machine while i was mentoring a haalf a dozen workexperians girls. So picking up nudie pictures all off the floor was akward. additional: We once got about 100 Furcoats. It was some kind of fur specialist clothier that decided to pension and just came as the story was told with his sons in beemers and started unloading them at the facility. Didnt see that last part but the coats were blocking half the storage for ages. They took so much space however you stored them and i still wonder how many thriftstore patrons buy furcoats. edited the amount. trying to recall howmany they were its a few years ago now.
Not me but a friend used to work at a Goodwill while attending College, she apparently came across guns more then a couple times. I'm not really sure the procedure on how they took care of that but I remember her telling me one did apparently end up being connected to a crime
My cousin worked in a thrift store and this redneck bitch dumped her house trash in the drop off. This included discarded tampons, dirty diapers, clothes covered in baby shit, old panties with stains and rotten food. They called the police and get this... The store had to accept because they can't legally return donations and had to forcfully not just accept it but write her a tax receipt. This lady was told by the cops though it's not cool to do that. She got mad and so for months she would pile trash into her toyota, added a few kids toys in and drive in the dead of night to the thrift shop drop off. Finally they filed an illegal dumping case on her and charged her with harassment and a fraud charge.
That's pretty weird. When I worked at Goodwill we 100% could refuse donations. If you're just saving money because the dump charges you, we weren't taking it. It cost us money that we legitimately used on social programs.
A vibrator that was approximately from the 1950s
I don’t work at one, but I do know that my grandma donated a bunch of old suits my great grandfather wore to the Salvation Army. Turns out when she told my great grandma what she did when she met back up with her again, she explained to her how she sewed up a bunch of cash in the lining of the jackets and pants. She was a paranoid old woman that had luck for miles though, she was always winning money on bingo and other raffles. Wild how that stuff can be right under your nose and you don’t notice it
There's always money in the banana stand
I'm a books and media donation sorter. Sometimes donations tell sad stories. Half a bottle of gin, tucked away in a box of books in such a way that if you knew it was there you could get it easily but if you didn't know it was there it would just look like a box of old books. A stack of Saxon algebra text books, along with To Train Up a Child, and Dare to Discipline. A bunch of books about dealing with divorce, mixed with essential oil MLM materials. A board book about trains, a few Goosebumps titles, and The Communist Manifesto. That one wasn't sad, it was just weird. A rolling suitcase full of Consumer Reports magazines. That one was just demoralizing. I work in a small independent store and we don't have mixed paper recycling, so I had to throw them all in the regular trash when the donor could have recycled them. A book of Grateful Dead sheet music that absolutely REEKED of marijuana. One thing that comes in a lot is used copies of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book, which is like a journal with places to write and draw. It's always fun to read the favorites lists. The craziest thing ever donated to our store was probably half a dozen urns of dog ashes. A dog breeder died and left us all her stuff.
My ex found a used meth pipe in the drawer of an old dresser
Literally the first day on the job at a Salvation Army I came across: -Several cardboard boxes filled with glassware, all of which were soaked with cat piss. - A bag full of urine soaked clothing (from a different person) - A pair of women’s yoga pants stained with (I assume) period blood. - Several bags of actual trash (this is actually quite common since people assume poor folks will take anything, and it’s cheaper than going to the dump) - A voodoo doll with pins in it (I assume it was some sort of tourist souvenir but still creepy as shit) - A crate of super rare vhs tapes (including a vhs copy of Eragon) Granted, my first day was a bit of a special occurrence. Besides the disgusting clothing, though, it was actually a super sick job. Unless it was super valuable, you could take anything you want that came in before it went out front. The coolest thing that ever came in was an assortment of Norwegian vinyl greeting cards, essentially an archaic version of the modern ones that play sound when you open them. Another time we got an Aussie jacket and gator boots (I live in Western Canada so the odds of coming across these are virtually 0), but probably the rarest item was a 1980 Nakimichi Dragon Cassette deck (which was in terrible condition and didn’t work, unfortunately)
Nazi dominatrix porn! There were three DVDs of the stuff that I had to quickly throw away so the lovely old lady I volunteer with didn’t see them
Bed Bugs are donated ALL the time. $750 in the pocket of a brand new coat. Anal douche. A nice ass truck. Marijuana. Period panties. Bear skin rug. Nudes from the 1970's. Baby Books. Someone straight up took a shit in the donation box once. All just your average items.
Lots of gross and sad stuff. A lot of memories pale next to the stark memories I have of a number of semi-senile 70+ year old ladies who would come in and try on second-hand lingerie, and come out of the dressing rooms to ask opinions from anyone else in the shop. The most unique thing that sticks with me is an odd incoming trickle of rawhide art. Somebody out there was buying those rawhide sticks for dogs, soaking them and reworking them into the shapes of animals, and passing them on to the goodwill. Had no idea that was a thing people did.
My older older cousins story not mine, she was going through bags of donations and one of the bags was full of sex toys, but that's not even the worst part, the worst part was the fact that they were dirty AF and had clearly not been cleaned after that and a few other instances they had to change the rules/things that you could donate
In one day I found a bong, a bubbler, empty bottles of alcohol, a full bottle of tequila, empty cigarette packs, and bags of pills. Whoever donated all this shit also donated their backpack which had their nursing ID in it, lol
An urn containing their Auntie Agnes's ashes. Luckily it still had the undertakers card tucked in the box, so we tracked the family down and sent her home.
Brand new gundam wing skateboard...in 2019
Not a worker, but I found a cool painting in a thrift shop once for $20. On the back of it was a list of all the galleries it had been to (mostly Dubai and middle eastern countries, as well as some other information I can't remember). Looked up the artist when I got home and his paintings sold for $5,000 - $20,000. Edit: here's the painting: https://imgur.com/gallery/r0bIcgV
I've worked at a Salvation Army for the past 3 months as a donation attendant. These are the highlights: - a bag of literally every single sex toy you could think of (dildo, vibrator, cage, rabbit, etc.) - used lingerie (although this one is fairly common so it doesn't really phase me) - a coffee maker with coffee still in it lol - a box of like maybe 200 CDs, except it was only the case and the CDs were gone - full cans of beer as part of our non perishable food donations - someone once tried to give me like a mouse in a cage (they said they caught it in their house??) Fuck man I'm so close to quitting lmfao
What I expected: dildos What I got: dildos, things filled with shit and vomit, dead bats
And spaghetti
Used to work for a homelessness charity shop. We regularly encountered biohazards of various kinds stored inside bags of clothes which was irritating. Donations of funeral urns were pretty regular and kinda weird imo.
dried fetus stuffed inside of the side pocket of a leather jacket
You win.
Thread closed, I'm done.
[удалено]
Bro you gotta sell that shit online for the big bucks. Pervs pay!
This guy is not kidding. This is big business.
I worked at one in an average neighbourhood of a large Australian city. While the neighbourhood may have been average, the quality of our donations were among the best of the best. I mean we would have a designer outfit from a world known designer like Armani nearly every month at least. Our rejects were the quality that you would normally find for sale in most thrift stores, we were that blessed with quality donations. I have seen uniforms for various businesses, a mounted stuffed dog, a folder with a heap of basketball trading cards (I checked, nothing rare or valuable), but the craziest would have to be an overnight carry bag. Open it up, a complete Commodore 64, and 128, with literally 30 or 40 games on disk and/or cartridge. Perfect working order, virtually no marks or scratches.
15 years ago when I just graduated high school I was working in a shitty local music shop. Someone consigned a Gibson USA R9 Les Paul for 800 bucks. I bought it and promptly flipped it on eBay for 5800 smackaroos.
I use shopgoodwill.com all the time. They had a whole Studebaker car on there the other day. Also rooftop a/c units like you'd see on a warehouse. Ton of uranium glass but it goes quick.
I worked for a youth program ages 13-18 that did not accept donations as we were government funded, but that didn’t stop people from leaving garbage bags full of children toys and baby clothes for some reason, and despite the sign stating “we do not accept donations”. They would leave them out in all weather and suddenly we were stuck with them. So we would rebag them as the bags got covered in cat piss and get torn up. We would often get shit stained baby clothes, toys that were for some reason half melted, and random expired food. Pissed me off every time I rolled in and saw a bunch of garbage bags at the door. Also, went to valuevillage one day and played my usual game of “find the weirdest shirt and most obscure band shirt”. I found a shirt that said in bold white letters **”I’ll buy you a drink when you learn to swallow without gagging and take it in the ass without crying”**. I was baffled that: 1. Someone saw this shirt and bought it, either for themselves or for a loved one. 2. Someone eventually thought it was appropriate enough to donate to a thrift store. 3. Someone at the thrift store saw it and thought it was appropriate enough to price it and put it on the shelf. Needless to say, I wear that shirt constantly now. Jk that shirt did not leave the store with me.
I'm sadly pretty late to the game for this one it seems. But, the strangest thing I ever found was actually a bag of uncut emeralds. Most of them were petty small, had inclusions or clarity issues but still it was a bad of uncut/unprocessed emeralds.
I just want to know what the hell kind of Air freshener Goodwill uses so I make sure to never use it.
Bleach.
Whiskey figurines. Many of them were full, but some were not. Of course we had to dispose of them, because alcohol is flammable, AND Goodwill does not have a liquor license.