I just realized they installed the seat stays upside down.

The staff at thrift stores are well-meaning, but most always blissfully ignorant of the value of bikes plus or minus. They are also almost always overwhelmed by the sheer, humungous volume of STUFF OF ALL KINDS, including vast volumes of TOTAL CRAP, including bikes, that they receive, and by necessity have to immediately trash/recycle huge volumes of same, including, alas, bikes.

At times the staff is aware they their customers at times get outrageous deals on certain bikes, and they try to make up for it by pricing some shiny bikes (that in their wild imagination could be super valuable) really high. But they still mean well, they are trying the help their hard-pressed organizations make money.

The thrift stores in San Diego are outrageous with their bike prices.

Excellent point Drakonchik! The Goodwill near me has a MOUNTAIN of donations in the receiving area every time I drive by, I can only imagine what it's like to sort through that chaos on a daily basis.

I worked at a thrift store for a few months. The highlight was putting TVs in the trash compactor so they were on top, only halfway on the piston and then watching them explode when only half of the TV hit the receptacle - boom!

I worked a couple of temp shifts at the sally ann warehouse. They get soo much crap. everything donated to the stores gets picked up by the trucks, carted back to the warehouse, sorted, and then sent back out. huge quantities of goods are thrown away, because most people, consciously or not, are "donating" stuff because donating is free and going to the dump costs money. Trust me, I perpetrated the foul deed myself on Tuesday.

While the thrift store closest to me gets a mountain of donations, they also have a huge number of customers. Their parking lot looks as busy as the nearby Walmart. I have donated stuff, drove around the building to park, and by the time I entered the store, one of the "semi-pro" flea market pickers had already grabbed it. This thrift store has no storage, so donations are priced immediately and are out on the floor in a flash. Even the junker garbage bikes don't last a day. If you don't happen to be there the moment a decent bike goes out, forget it, its gone.

I have seen a couple of pro pickers hit the shoe department, like a swarm of locusts. In a couple of minutes, just about every pair is gone. They must have bought at least 100 pair. The store wheeled out a rack of jackets once, and before they could put them on the store shelves, a picker grabbed the entire roll out rack, and bought all of the jackets....

My experience with Goodwill and SA has always been that they price things by weight and size regardless of quality or desireability. A good example would be televisions. They would have a 30-year-old TV with a 36-channel tuner that barely worked for $100 and a 2-year-old Sony Trinitron that had barely been used right next to it for the same price.

The rule to thrift store pricing is that there is no rule. Many chains in their back rooms actually have a small # of departments managed by (in theory) a competent person who is able to sort, fix and price items in his/her field, usually books, clothes, electronics, appliances. Some have local volunteers -- self-appointed "experts", offenders on community service, or just regular folks -- come in from time to time to do this. But the general level of competence and knowledge, given the background of the folks who toil there, to be kind ain't always great, and is most always overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incoming junk.

That's insane! I've seen a similar scene play out at the as-is outlets when they open in the morning, people are lined up at the doors and there's a full-contact race to the shoe bins. Pretty entertaining! A couple of the more active local bike flippers have a few thrift shops where they do the same thing, but it's a bit more civilized with the exception of one sociopath.

What I don't understand is how anybody can make a living on used shoes like that. I've sold a few on line and no matter how high quality, and how well presented, you can get diddly-$quat half the time.

Stuff found at thrifts over the years:
1973 Eisentraut
Trek 720 (1984)
Trek 710
Trek 620
Trek 560
Syke's Magneet
Peugeot UO10
Bridgestone RB2
Cannondale Black Lightning
Motobecane Grand Jubilee
Waterford Schwinn Paramount
LeJuene Professional
Ross Aristocrat
Campy C-Record Wheelset
Simplex retrofriction shifters (mounted on wrecked Peugeot UO 8)
Panasonic DX4000

And a bunch of other stuff I forget, or was too numerous to mention.

Select any four, and together they were less than the Breeze that started this thread.

At the as-is, you pay by the pound, and the buyers I'm referring to ship bulk lots of clothes to Haiti. I don't know the details of the business, but they seem to be doing ok. As for the good stuff, it comes in pretty frequently here. I've found two pairs of these in the last year:



Sorry, getting OT...

I've never seen any good bike deals at thrift stores here. I'm jealous whenever I see people here talking about the $20 and $30 bikes they find at thrift stores and garage sales. Every adult-sized bike at the thrift store is at least $70, at least as far as I've seen. Sometimes it's hard to keep from buying what I know is a POS, just to have something to mess with.

I think I'm gonna miss that store when we move this summer. I've gotten some good scores there over the past few years.