Issue #55

The winners of Flip Weekly’s 3 x $50 Vinnies Gift Card Instagram contest have been announced on the podcast. Take a listen to see if that’s you! What a whirlwind week, you’ve seen the headline so you know I stumbled across some Pokemon cards that were factory sealed for just $4… or were they? Read on to see exactly what happened plus some really cool finds and sales that can help you make some money. But first!

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Podcast

• Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

If there’s one thing I hate about buying items at thrift stores, it’s the questions that come with checking out. What’s this? Is this for you? What are you going to do with these? Those questions immediately sprung to mind when I picked up these next items.

First off sorry about the image quality, I’ve been recording my finds for social media and forgot to take photos. What we have here is some nostalgia for any women that grew up in the 90’s - a bundle of Total Girl magazines from around 15 years ago. Here’s a better photo of the bundle:

The magazines were $1 each and the reason I picked them up was mostly to see just how dedicated Taylor Swift fans actually are. This is technically vintage Taylor Swift, plus a few other young celebrities, actors and singers. When I was at the thrift store, the bundle was maybe around 20-25, but not all the 1 magazine. I decided to pick out 10 of the same magazine just to make the listing a bit consistent and I chose the celebrities that I think would get the most attention and that means taking all of the Taylor Swift’s.

There weren’t that many active listings for Total Girl mags but we did have some sales and the numbers surprised me.

It was 100% a gamble however after I listed for $59.95 with free post and having the listing live for under 2 days, it’s already received 40 views on eBay which surpasses the popularity of some of my other stuff. Could be something to look out for at garage sales in the future if this bundle sells for full price.

This is going to be hard to believe, the following 4 drinking glasses could be worth up to $300 and I paid just $12 for all of them.

They look pretty unremarkable, they’re some basic drinking glasses with a gold rim and a print on each of them. Zooming in underneath the glasses we can see a 1982 copyright and looking closer at the graphics, they’re caricatures of some of Australia’s best cricketers: Dennis Lillee, Greg Chappell, Rod Marsh and Allan Border. You don’t need to be an expert on Australian cricket to spot these, they just stuck out to me among the numerous other generic drinking glasses.

We have 3 active listings:

In terms of sold listings, only the 1:

So the collection of 4 don’t seem to come up too often and with a sold listing of $125 and an active listing of $300, we have a bit of room to work with. My total cost of goods is only $12 so if I split the difference and list for $200, that should net me around $150 profit. Pretty good for a couple of glasses.

Before I get into the Pokemon cards, I want to show off a couple of signed books that I found this week. It’s funny, I’ve never seen either of these titles in thrift stores before and that’s the primary reason why I picked them up and it just so happens to turn out they’re both signed.

First off was Mara Wilsons’ book of short essays Where Am I Now? Mara Wilson was somebody that I grew up watching on screen. Matilda is iconic and Mrs Doubtfire is a classic, she was such an amazing child actor. In the book she talks about accidental fame, stories from the movies she starred in and the transition from “cute child actor“ to “no longer cute enough for Hollywood“. It’s a really interesting read and I would keep it for my personal collection… if it wasn’t worth about a hundred bucks with the signature.

People are trying to get some pretty high numbers for it, but I think a more reasonable figure is $99.95. I came to that price just based on her other autographed memorabilia that has been sold on eBay:

I do think a book is more valuable than just a signed photograph because you’re getting some sort of functionality from it, but with comps around the $100 mark let’s just stick to that. Either way, I paid $3.99 so that into $100 is good enough for me.

The next was a signed copy of The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero for $2. The book, the movie it was based on, and the movie that was inspired by the book… were all incredible in their own ways. If you haven’t heard of the movie The Room, don’t read up about it, don’t watch any trailers or do any Googling, go and watch it tonight and please report back. To not issue any spoilers, all I’ll say is that I wish Tommy Wiseau had signed the book. If he did, it would go from the $49.95 that I have it currently listed for to easily hundreds. In fact, I’d probably keep it for myself.

Moving on to something I could not believe was in a thrift store for $4… you guessed it, the title of this newsletter… sealed Pokemon packs.

I don’t know how this slipped through the cracks, in most thrift stores anything Pokemon card related is put into glass display cabinets, marked up 1000% and barred from being opened to see what you’re actually buying. I’m going to guess that this slipped through with employees thinking they were pricing up an empty tin, because to be fair, shaking it sounds empty and the plastic was still half on.

However, the tin was not in fact empty, it contained:

• 1 of 2 foil Pokemon-GX cards: Solgaleo-GX or Lunala-GX!

• 4 Pokemon TCG booster packs!

• A code card to unlock a playable deck in the Pokemon Trading Card Game Online!

Look, I typed this out from reading the back of the tin, at the time I had no idea what any of this really meant. I grew up with Pokemon, I was obsessed with the TV show and the cards but stopped once they went from the original 150 to whatever it is now.

I was so lost in fact that when I got home and opened this thing up I thought everything was fake because the 4 packs inside weren’t exactly the same. I started to inspect the packs, doubt the authenticity of the seals, and even put out a video showing my find in the hopes of someone calling me out saying that what I have is just fake packs. Unfortunately that didn’t happen so all of Saturday and Sunday I was disappointed that I couldn’t flip this from $4 into an easy $100.

Over the weekend however the Instagram Reel I posted showing off the find had somehow surpassed 10,000 views and so I decided to follow the advice of the comments and crack the packs. I went and bought a little tripod for my phone so I could open the packs with both hands but it was at that moment I had some weird guttural feeling to look into the make up of the tins again and that’s when I found out that the make up of the packs was consistent with everyone elses, basically saying that the packs were real, they weren’t fake. I thought screw it, I’m this far, who cares about the $100 resell value (ugh) and instead I’ll have some fun and open the Pokemon cards, something I haven’t done in decades.

You can see the full opening on Instagram but suffice to say that despite thinking I had some cool cards (a holographic Blastoise!) they all turned out to be cards that I wouldn’t buy to resell. I think 2 were worth around $20-$30 each so it wouldn’t be a complete waste but I’m not going to bother, instead I’m going to give them away.

If this is your first time reading the newsletter or you’re unfamiliar with thrifting, Pokemon cards are treated like gold by thrift stores. It doesn’t matter what they are, how old they are or which collection they’re from, they’re going to be priced high and they’re going to be picked through a hundred times before you get to see them on the floor. To find sealed packs of Pokemon cards at a thrift store is like finding a hard drive full of Bitcoin at a Welsh dump… it just doesn’t happen.

Anyway, I’m still in shock that I found sealed Booster packs in a thrift store.

I might have said this in another Issue, but Bop It’s are weirdly popular, especially when there’s a novelty factor associated with them. I’ve bought Bop It’s before from thrift stores and garage sales and the more obscure, the better they sell. Take this for example:

It’s a Star Wars BB-8 Bop It. If that sounds confusing, just think of it as a Bop It shaped as R2-D2. Everyone knows R2, right? Anyway, like with most things that are popular, obscure versions are where the money is at. You can buy a regular Bop It from your local mall for a couple of bucks, but if you come across something like this, it’s going to sell well and sell fast.

I paid $3 for this BB-8 Bop It and there’s not a single listing on eBay Australia but the comps are good:

It’s not mind blowing but it’s something I wanted to just let you know about. This thing is small, it looks cheap and you can easily snag it for a few bucks just like me. I put mine up for $50 and I don’t think I’ll have a problem with the sale price considering there’s none local - just remember, Bop It + obscure = worth buying.

P.S. if you find a Bop It from around the year 2000, especially sealed, it’s valuable.

What I Sold

Amazing sell through rate of this first item, gone in just 2 days.

Picked up in a Lifeline thrift store for $60, it sold for $150 + postage via Facebook Marketplace in just 2 days. There’s a reason why most new resellers lean towards video games and handheld consoles and it’s because they sell fast and are always in high demand. It’s not often you find something like this in a thrift store (with profit to be made) and I chalk up this find to the fact some thrift stores price consoles that are boxed, as if they are loose. Keep that in mind next time you see something like this.

I forgot to mention this sale last week, we have $199.95, off overseas to the US for the Password Journal that I came across in Issue #49. By the way, I went back to #49 and that was a crazy week for finds - the Issue was titled “Thrift Store Find of the Year“ and that’s not even to do with this 2004 Girl Tech Password Journal that netted us something silly like $175 profit just for this old piece of tech. The buyer paid an additional $61.64 in shipping and sales tax so what a find this was. Pat on the back.

This was highlighted in last weeks Issue of Flip Weekly as the “$150 DVD That Almost Stayed On The Shelf“. It’s the entire collection of Neon Genesis Evangelion and was picked up for $6 and sold for $145.00. I talked more about spotting these sort of DVD’s in the Flip Weekly Podcast which you can listen to here.

Since when can you find complete in box Gameboy games in thrift stores? Admittedly, it’s the first one I’ve ever found and to be honest it’s probably the last. $18 for a CIB copy of Perfect Dark that regularly sells for $75 on eBay, an absolute steal that I wasn’t going to pass up simply because I knew it would sell quickly. It only netted me about $35.00 profit but it’s just something you’re not going to leave behind.

This wasn’t a huge sale but I do want to quickly mention it. This is a tiny Mighty Max figure from a playset called Mighty Max Slays the Doom Dragon that was released in 1992.

It was only in Issue #52 that I found a Might Max / Polly Pocket playset in a Vinnies for $3 and talked about the importance of these microfigures. If they’re not coming with their playsets, they’re lost and are gonna cost a bit to reacquire.

That’s exactly what’s happened here, somebody has misplaced the little Nazgûl looking guy and has needed to spend $20 + $10.95 post for this microfigure who legit measures like 2cm tall, if that. If Issue #52 didn’t convince you that these things are gold, this should. I forgot to mention where I got these from and the price I paid. I went into a Red Cross Op Shop here in Sydney and saw the smallest grab bag in existence and it contained 2 of these little Mighty Max figures and it was marked at $1. The other one is still for sale, but if it ends up selling, that little grab bag of 2cm figures would turn $1 into $56.85.

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Flip Weekly Podcast

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100% Free Resources to Help You

Flip Weekly have created the following resources to help you become a better reseller.

• Ultimate List of YouTube Reseller Channels

• Google Sheets Reseller Spreadsheet

• Memorize Video Game Prices with Flip Vidya

• eBay Sell Through Rate Calculator