Maximizing Garage Sale And Thrift Store Finds

It’s no secret that film photography gear is getting more expensive. I’m no economy expert but I can safely assume that part of this is because everything is getting more expensive. I don’t believe that this is the entire picture though. One of the worst offenders, in my opinion, are influencers and celebrities. Promoting their favourite film camera is almost guaranteed to hike up the price and that is one of the major differences between the analog and digital community: that while DSLR and mirrorless cameras are more often priced on their build quality and features, film cameras are priced on hype. This is why cameras like the Olympus mju point and shoots, despite their incredible unrepair-ability go for hundreds of dollars. The commercial failure like the Nishika N8000, which were garbage when they were new, often go for way more than their worth, and I could name more but I can already feel you fighting me in the comments. I’m also not here to argue the value of cameras, as much as help you find more of them for better prices than you’ll pay at KEH or eBay. While those are fine choices, and if you want something specific, the way to go, one of my favourite things was hunting for randomness.

Going into this, you should know a couple things. First, I don’t exaggerate when I say these are my best tips and if I was still thrifting, I would not dream of giving them up. Over the years, while posting videos and photos of my hauls, people would often ask how I do it and I never said a peep. It’s funny because sometimes people in my own city would say “man, I have such a hard time here, how do you do it?” Like hell I’m going to cut into my own finds by giving up my secrets to the competition. But, as some of you may already be aware, I’m no longer making videos on YouTube and no longer shooting film. For those reasons I’m ready to pass on the knowledge in hopes that you can start to control these outrageous prices and the more of you out there finding cameras for less, the better.

The other thing that needs to be said here is you do require at least a passive knowledge of what to look for in order to know if a camera works. Also, as you’ll see with my advice, sometimes testing a camera works in your favour, and other times it actually works against you. It’s very counterintuitive but some of this, as you’ll learn, is a numbers game. Sometimes that means taking a chance on a camera only to get home and discover it doesn’t work.

Before we dive into the real gold mine, which I believe to be garage sales, let’s have a gander at optimizing thrift shops. I know what you’re probably thinking by now, which is something along the lines of “Azriel, thrift shops notoriously overprice cameras and there are little to no deals left.” It’s hard to disagree with this because there’s a lot of truth there. Over the last ten years we have seen an industry wide trend of thrift stores increase their prices as retro becomes trendier. People are realizing that while the quality of new merchandise is on a down trend, much of what was made twenty years ago or more is of a higher calibre. It’ll come as no surprise when twenty years from now, these thrift shops will struggle to maintain the inventory they have now. A great example of this is Pyrex, but I digress. None the less I still had a few tricks up my sleeve and here are my best tips, starting with preparation.

Make A Map

One thing I did that saved me a serious amount of time was to make a custom Google Map of all the thrift shops in my city, and if you want to see it, you can find it here.

It includes a few cities that I added when I planned on visiting them, or passing through, but you’ll see the one for Calgary is colour coded. Unless I was going to drive around for twelve hours, I would not be able to get them all, so I broke them down into smaller routes. These routes are numbered in the order of visitation to minimize driving time. Optimizing your own routes may take a little trial and error, but part of making these thrift store finds worth it is to maximize your time. In addition to price increases, I have noticed a significant decrease in volume, and thus, this becomes a numbers game. Once you have a map, the next thing you’re going to need is a kit…

Battery Bag

Now, I should preface by saying this is the best tip I rarely used, because I always seemed to forget it, but I maintain it’s an amazing idea, due to how many times not following my own advice came back to bite me in the ass.

Buy a small bag with lots of pockets and fill them with the most common batteries used in film cameras. LR44’s, 2CR5’s, CR123A’s, etc. and make sure you test the camera before you buy it. I don’t know how many times I bought a seemingly fine SLR, only to discover it was an expensive paperweight. Still there are exceptions here. If the price is low enough, and you know you can resell it for parts to at least break even, then saving yourself the time is the priority. Same with if you find a bunch of cameras. Sitting for an hour going through them all is not always worth your time.

A couple other things you’ll want to include in your testing kit is a small flathead screwdriver. This will open battery compartments common for LR44 powered light meters, and it doubles as a chisel to remove battery acid from the contacts if needed. Once you have determined you’re going to buy it, there’s a way to potentially bring the price down…

Tags

Not all thrift stores have coded tags, but some do and we’ll talk about two I am familiar with: Value Village and Goodwill.

Value Village, or as it’s known elsewhere, Savers (both names having less meaning these days) use a coding system that shows the sales team how long an item has been on the floor, or in many cases, locked up in one of their special display cases. Now, I have never known how to decipher these tags, and you won’t need to. If you are at a display case, it’s likely a staff member is there with you. What I’d do was simply point at the tag while asking “how long has this item been here?” and if they say it has been several weeks, I’ll ask for a discount. 100% this will require a manager, and if they say yes, it’s usually a final sale.

Bonus Unethical Life Pro Tip (ULPT): If you find something on the shelf and think the price is too high you can rip the tag off and tell a staff member that it doesn’t have a tag and they will have someone in the back price it. It’s possible it’ll come back for less, but it’s a gamble.

Goodwill uses a colour coding system and offers a discount to the items that match the colour for that day. It will be the same at all locations and I imagine with enough effort, and recording of inventory and their colours you could come back and snag a deal, but I’ve never gone this far, as most decent cameras tend to be scooped up pretty fast.

Bonus ULPT: If found on a shelf, you could hide the item somewhere else in the store and come back on the day of its colour sale.

I wish I had more advice for you in terms of thrift stores, but the truth is it’s tough out there. However, if garage sales are seasonal like where I live due to the weather, then it’ll be your only option if you desperately need a fix for your G.A.S. habit. Garage sales though, I have a lot more to say, the first being that some of the best deals can be had without even leaving the home…

Message Them First

It was common for me to settle in with a cup of bean juice on a Saturday morning, and search though garage sale listings and just message them. Such an easy task that so many of us miss. I used Kijiji which is the popular choice in Canada, but if you use Craigslist or something else, the same rules apply. Your searches should be “garage sale,” “yard sale,” “moving sale,” and “estate sale” and you should be blazing through them with a little copy paste line like “Hey do you have any old cameras?” Don’t bother with anything long or complicated. Ninety percent of the time they will reply letting you know if they do or not. If they say no, simply reply with “okay, thanks!” This does two things: one, it’s just polite and two it’ll help sort out your messenger when you sift through it as you go. Seeing the message preview with an “okay, thanks” makes it a lot easier.

Now if they say yes, then politely ask if you can see a photo. More often than not they will oblige without any fuss, and you can negotiate from there. Occasionally you’ll get someone saying, “just come look” and don’t waste your time.

I cannot tell you how many cameras I have found without leaving my office, and how much time I have saved. Still, when you have to take the hunt to the streets, one of the best ways to maximize your effort is …

Community Garage Sales

To the uninitiated, community garage sales are pretty self explanatory. A neighbourhood puts out a notice to its residents that they are having a community wide parade of garage sales all on the same weekend. Sometimes there can be as many as fifty homes involved. This is where emailing won’t work because the contact on Kijiji (or whatever) isn’t aware of what everyone has, understandably. The other way to maximize your finds is to check the community demographics, specifically the average age of the residents and this can be done though the municipal website. Older communities are going to produce more older cameras, it’s simple math. Getting through the parade may seem a little overwhelming but there’s a simple way to shave a bunch of time off….

Ask Them

This tip doesn’t just apply to the community sales, but any time I show up at a garage/estate/yard sale I just find out who is in charge and ask if they “have any old cameras.” Not only does this save the effort of sifting through everything but what I have found in a significant chunk of my grabs is that they don’t even have them out, and in that case one of two things will happen. They will either go get it or they will ask for your contact info and you can come back at a later time to look at it. The number one reason I was told why it wasn’t on display was “I didn’t think anyone would want it.”

Once you have the item in your hand, you may be tempted to pull out that trusty kit I told you about earlier…don’t. The last thing you want to do is test the camera in front of them, and I know this might feel counter intuitive but the uncertainty of whether the camera works will help the negotiation phase. Do however, look over the camera in every way you can, but the main goal here is to…

Find Flaws

Now, this is where some of you won’t agree with my tactics but as part of my repertoire of getting good deals, I sought out issues with the camera. The easiest was the light seals, especially on cameras from the 1970s. I’d open the back, run my finger across the seal, and almost always some gunk came off, and I would show it to them and say, “the light seals are going to need to be replaced.” If they still seem stubborn or you haven’t reached a number you both agree on, I’d ask if they tested it and when was the last time it was used. You want them to say “no” as much as possible to get them to say “yes” to your price. You might be asking how you yourself determine this and that’s an easy one…

Get Comfortable Saying One Number

Pick a number and get used to saying it over and over again. You want to seem comfortable and confident in your choice, so it makes sense to say the same thing. For me, I held up the item and said, “five bucks?” Now, people are getting more savvy, or they are overcompensating, but always pick a low number, a price that you can recover if it turns out to be a hot piece of garbage. If you’re worried about insulting the seller, this may actually work in your favour, as outlined in the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It, a read I cannot recommend enough. The basic idea of it is it throws them off their axis and makes negotiating easier. Have a different number for single items and bundles, and that brings me to my last tip I’ll give you and possibly my greatest piece of advice: If you take one thing away from this today, it’s to…

Never Empty the Bag!

A number of years ago, I’m at a garage sale and I come across a camera bag, circa 1970s and it’s just packed with stuff, and I start pulling it all out while the owner is dealing with someone else and then I realize that if I come up to them with an armful of stuff, negotiating will be a lot harder. It’s the subtle psychological difference of selling a bunch of items, and a bag of stuff. The other added bonus is if they are stubborn and won’t come down in price, you can then start pulling out the gems and negotiate those, knowing they won’t go over their final number of the total, assuming they are willing to break up the bundle. This helped me once at a flea market when I saw a camera with two lenses, and while the trio was overpriced, I ended up with a good deal on a single lens, as the seller overvalued the camera body, but undervalued the lenses.

A note about morals: While I used to feel bad if I swindled someone out of a camera for much less than its worth, the reality is they have access to the same internet as I do and a five minute search will give them any answers they seek. It’s not our job to educate the buyer. If someone did say they’d get a better price on eBay, I would agree saying “true, but you may sit on it for six months” and this was usually enough to sway them.

Conclusion

Without a doubt there will come a time when all of these thrifty finds will be gone. Ten years ago I could pick up an entire darkroom for fifteen bucks and now I see enlargers going for a thousand. All I can say is, thankfully Pentax is taking initiative and producing new film cameras and what that means is people will be able to start opting for a brand-new film camera with a warranty, rather than taking a risk on a possibly broken antique with a bloated price tag. Even though I’m not shooting film anymore, I still want to see the prices come down because right now the analog community seems to be just for the privileged. One of my last videos, which I have since removed, was a suggestion that everyone’s first camera should be a disposable one. It’s an easy entry into film that almost anyone can afford, they could go buy one at their local drug store today and have it developed tomorrow, doesn’t have the risk of being broken, and still showcases the most important part: the process, mystery and magic of film. It was not well received. I had a horde of snooty, overprivileged hipsters and boomers in the comments tell me what a horrible idea that was, and someone brand new to film, should just go and buy a real quality camera to start. Unfortunately, that is the biggest downfall of the analog community over the last ten years, at least on the face of social media…it’s becoming classist.

If you don’t get attached to a specific model and have a little DIY savvy, there are a bunch of cameras out there that aren’t AE-1’s or RZ67’s for a good price being completely ignored by TikTok. Good luck out there.

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