Issue #94

What a week. With the Garage Sale Trail in the rearview mirror we’ve got our weekends back. Plenty of time to waste away at home endlessly scrolling through Faceboook Marketplace looking for banger deals. What do you know? We got one.

Not only did we get lucky on the weekend, we also had our literal biggest flip of all time during the week. Crack the champagne, it's come just in time for us to spend the profits on everyone else. Don't you just love Christmas?

Reminder you can listen to this weeks podcast which features my top 10 things I hate about Savers. Not exactly a great sales pitch, aye? Either way, check it out.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Official Flip Weekly Podcast

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

What’s the deal with thrift store collectible drinking glasses? A question I know that has been on your mind. Are they all worthless? Is there any worth buying? Should I just skip the aisle?

The answer is… well, it’s nuanced. We’ve all seen old school Nutella glasses priced high. Whether it’s The Simpsons, Looney Tunes or Blinky Bill, the value usually begins and ends with a quick “heh, that’s cool“.

Then you have the beer. It might be tempting to pick up the odd Australian beer drinking glass but chances are the effort to wrap, secure and post it wont be worth your time (plus you should just drink it out of the can or bottle).

So where does value lie? This week I found a brand of frosted glasses that are worth picking up and I’m guessing the thrift store employees aren’t privy to it just yet. It’s a brand called Monkeys of Melbourne.

Monkeys of Melbourne was an Australian company that created a wide range of licensed products back in the 80’s and 90’s. Known for hand painting their items and high quality craftsmanship they established a small cult like following who actively seek out their work.

Some of their most valuable frosted glassware are from The Phantom and you can see those selling on eBay consistently for $100 and up.

It’s not just The Phantom, they had licensing from the biggest companies in the world.

When it comes to Looney Tunes, an IP I’m still not sold on, we have Sold Comps that could swing a fence sitter. Tweety Bird for $89.99, Foghorn Leghorn for $61.95, Tasmanian Devil for $74.00. Without a doubt Disney is a bigger brand than Looney Tunes and with a perfect set of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, I’m expecting to list these up for a combined $100 + postage.

Whilst I highly doubt they get snapped up quickly (I mean, it’s still $100 for a pair of drinking glasses) I do think they’d sell a hell of a lot quicker than any other collectible drinking glass you’d find in an op shop. That said, Savers had a brilliant idea to mark the bottom of these glasses with “x2“ meaning there was 2 in the set. They did this in what appears to be permanent marker because I’m having a bit of a difficult time getting it cleaned off.

That leads me to something I wrote this week. It’s called 10 Things I Hate About Savers. It’s actually a really clever, creative and hilarious jingle and available only on this weeks Flip Weekly podcast. Give it a listen and be sure to hit me up with your constructive critisizm, I’m obviously trying to get better at rapping.

Speaking of a $100+ item that thrift store employees still haven’t caught on to, and we probably shouldn’t keep talking about it, we have cruise ship models.

According to some, those who take cruises are the worst kinds of people. I disagree. They spend big money to go on these cruises, and when they get back home they need a memento and thus purchase these little model ships for exorbitant amounts of money.

I’ve sold these a bunch of times, always for at least $100 and they’ve always sold quickly. No matter which cruise ship you find, if you can get it for a few dollars, which in all likelihood you will, buy it. You’ve got yourself a $100 item.

Toy Story has just had its Teaser Trailer released for the 5th installment of the film. It’s due out in theaters in June 2026 and as with all theatrical releases, especially a Disney Pixar film, the marking budget will be insane. In the beginning of 2026 Toy Story will be everywhere. You’ll see the ads, you’ll hear the hype, it will be impossible to escape.

Take advantage of this information. Any good quality Toy Story related merchandise you can find between now and then should sell and sell quickly.

Enter: the litmus test.

Not exactly “good quality“ but in a Lifeline op shop I found this Bucket o Soldiers priced at $4. The bucket was worn, it was ragged and the stickers were falling off. We took off the lid and the solders inside… surprisingly good condition. I have a vague recollection that this original Bucket o Soldiers is worth a bit of money so I look it up.

Within Australia, we have 9 Active Listings and 10 Sold Listings. Good start, that’s a positive sell through rate. Seems to be a mix of the original version released in 1995 and the reissued in 2009. 2009 looks like this:

1995 is harder to find but it’s safe to assume we can get almost $100 for it even considering the bucket is beat up. The closest comp I can find is within Australia, for $150 and is sitting on 7 watchers.

Next up is a DVD series that we’ll be listing not for $50, not for $100 or even $150, but $200.

This is series 1 to 10 of Red vs Blue. I’m very aware of this web series based off of the video game Halo. I remember a friend of mine in high school, massive stoner, desperately trying to convince me to “check out this sick Halo show“ back in the early 2000’s. It was a bunch of dudes doing voice work while playing the video game. It gained a following and ended up running from 2003 to 2021.

This box set of season 1-10 sells for $100, but we got lucky.

Hiding a bit further down on the shelf were seasons 11, 12 and 13.

We’re able to differentiate ourselves from the other people selling the Box Set with the addition of season 11-13. The thing about this show, like many other rare titles, is the later you get with the seasons, the more insane money people are asking for. The beauty of this webisode series is that the discs are region free. I’ll be able to ship these to any place on Earth barring the United States. That’s right, still haven’t bothered to work out Zonos. I think I’ll just wait for some tariff flip flopping.

How’d we do with Facebook Marketplace this week? Not too shabby, we ended up paying up for a Nintendo 64 bundle. An unusual find on Marketplace but I’m thinking people were concerned about 3 things. 1, the price. 2, the quality and 3, legitimacy. Let me explain.

It was a bit unusual to message a N64 bundle when it had been live for over 20 minutes and receive a “Yes, it’s still available“ message. I read down the listing description and could see “Five controllers (need repair)“. That’s a red flag. We then take a better look at the photos and whilst we’ve got all the regular games like Goldeneye and Mario Kart, we don’t have too many heavy hitters. If anything, I guess you could call these the “bread and butter“ Nintendo 64 games.

That title would be appropriate considering it looks like some of these cartridges have been used as a butter board. Scratched labels and carts, a disgusting mess of God knows what on some of them. Gross part about that is it comes off.

Nevertheless, I’ve sold cartridges without labels on them for the regular price so it’s not putting me off. What should have raised another red flag, and I’m wondering if you picked it up in those above images, is that not all of the games are PAL.

This sneaky bugger, of course the one that would be worth the most, is an NTSC cartridge.

Not only that, I’m 99.9% sure it’s fake. Whilst the other cartridges looked as though they were pulled out of a dumpster, this one is in pristine condition. However, the logos are blurry, the pins are a different color and the label is off-centered.

A right pain considering this is the one game I comped prior to agreeing on the deal.

Oh well, I got everything home and noticed that error, and then went onto testing the other games. Fortunately, they all worked. In terms of the controllers, all technically work, but only 2 joysticks I’d consider functional. That’s fine, they’re all authentic and can be repaired (by someone other than me, although I’ve seen online it’s quite simple but not financially worth it).

Here’s how it all comps up and how I’ll list it:

After fees and shipping we should easily double our money. I love when these deals come with accessories that the seller either doesn’t realize is worth money or doesn’t care. The games came on a storage stand that sell at The Gamesman for $69.95. I am pushing with some of these prices but it’s just before Christmas. Who wouldn’t want to receive a scratched up Mario Kart or a Cruis’n World covered in… God knows what.

A few other finds this week:

What I Sold

This is my biggest thrift store flip of all time.

Just 6 months ago, in what feels like a lifetime of thrifting, I walked into a Vinnies and found a bundle of Sonic the Hedgehog paperback books. At the time, this is what I said to you:

I spent just $2 for each book, a combined $60 for what are Sonic comics in a small pocket book format. They look indifferent from any other kids book or story book, you could even confuse them for those free comics given out by religious institutions. Nothing about them, besides being the beloved Sonic character scream value.

That’s when I looked at Active and Sold Listings.

This was a rare collection. Each paperback contained multiple issues of Sonic the Hedgehog comics. At the time I saw Active Listings for bundles of 25 for close to $3,000. We have Issue 0-20 which were listed up for $1,999.95. Over time, the price was reduced. I was trying to initiate a sale before the end of the year and fortunately the reductions paid off. We have a sale of $1,599.95. We’ve turned $60 into $1,600!

I’ve made it known that Sonic is a character that you comp up whenever you see him. Besides this amazing sale, here are my top 3 Sonic the Hedgehog sales.

See a Sonic, buy a Sonic. Yes, you have to get a bit lucky to find some of this stuff, but like anything when the opportunity presents itself, you’ll be ready.

Some kid is gonna be very happy and some parents are gonna be very sad. I guess this is the going rate for bulk modern Wiggles DVD’s, 20 for $100 free post. It cost me something like $19 to ship these off in a large box.

A scenario… so if you got each DVD for $1 that’s $20 total plus the postage and eBay fees with a 3% promoted rate you’d be left with… $44.30 profit. That’s actually not too bad, you’d have to find yourself a thrift store with bulk Wiggles and only charging $1, but that doesn’t sound impossible. If the DVD’s were $2 each you’d be reducing your profit down to just $24 so it wouldn’t be worth it. That said, since finding these for free I’ve seen multiple other Facebook Marketplace listings pop up with free Wiggles DVD’s so you should keep an eye out there.

$8 in Savers for an item that looks like a complex specialized tool. It looks complicated, expensive and after searching Sold Listings I could see it was worth around $180 brand new. When I originally picked this up at the end of October I could see that the sell through rate was great overseas, but poor in Australia. It averaged around 1 sale per month. For reference Bruce Almighty on DVD, one of the worst items to sell averages around 9 per month.

With this information I undercut every single Active Listing in Australia, priced it at $150 and I guess we’re November’s sale. Knowing the sell through rate is extremely important, it allows you to make decisions on how to price your item. Basically how I was able to price the Nintendo 64 items above. We know a game like Goldeneye 007 has a high sell through rate so we don’t need to undercut the cheapest listing which is $36.15. We can list at $50 and know that we will eventually get the sale. Use the link above for help with calculating sell through rate.

Speaking of a good sell through rate we’ve had 2 Gamecube games prove why the category is so hot. 5 days for Mario Kart and 7 days for Luigi’s Mansion. We’ve now broken even on our Gamecube bundle deal and are in the profit. Not sure why, but for both of these games the buyers sent through a message asking if the games played okay, and then today somebody messaged asking the same thing for Pikmin. Must be a common concern for Gamecube buyers.

A sick Vinnies find, a brand new and sealed limited edition Pokemon DVD set. Back in June I found this, plus another open version for $15 each. The entire reason Pokemon fans would be buying these is because of the way the DVD’s are stored. I mean, you could buy the complete series of Pokemon Johto on regular DVD for like… $60. It’s literally double the price just because of the giant Pokedex packaging.

I had this Sony Walkman priced up at $150 for a while now. Somebody did buy it before and then sent it back because they didn’t read the description. The LCD screen doesn’t work but everything else does. I guess I lost faith in it ever selling and accepted a $90 best offer. It’s still a really cool piece of portable media history and the product design is really slick.

A few other sales:

That’s all I’ve got for you this week, thanks again for reading and I’ll see you again next Thursday.

Mat.

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