Want Weirdness? Check Out These Weird (and Awesome) Thrift Shop Finds!

You may be surprised to hear, but the thrift industry is actually incredibly profitable. Over $4 billion is spent each year in the resale of clothing, jewelry and other items in the United States.

That’s a lot of different items that are floating around out there in the world at any given time. Items end up at thrift stores for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the previous owner might’ve just been sick of it, or needed extra cash, or even died. The kind of things thrift stores accept vary wildly, so you never know what you might get when you enter a store.

Sometimes the finds can be really far out there. It’s not just the infamous grandfather’s coats you can find at a thrift store, but a whole world of weird treasures. Read on, and we’ll walk you through some of the weirdest thrift shop finds of all time.

Too Good To Be True Clothing Finds

The most common item you’ll find in your average thrift store is clothing. Most thrift stores, including big names like Goodwill or Salvation Army, have rows and rows and rows of clothing spread out over the bulk of their stores.

For the most part, this clothing may be unremarkable. But that isn’t always the case!

Take the case of Rikki McEvoy, who found an old football sweater at her local North Carolina thrift store back in 2014. The sweater was sold to Rikki at a cool 58 cents total, as it was fairly damaged. But she liked its appearance and thought it might be good as something her husband could wear around the house.

She fixed it up for him and it became a part of her husband’s small closet. But, months later while watching a football documentary about famed coach Vince Lombardi, they noticed a similar sweater onscreen. In fact, it looked like just about the same sweater.

When they checked inside the sweater on the tag, there was Lombardi’s signature. They were then able to sell the sweater for over $40,000! Talk about a good find.

Another similar case occurred in Oxford only two years before. A man stepped into a local thrift store and was intrigued to find a small handbag with Elvis’ face on it staring back at him. He purchased it for $30, and only later came to discover that it an original Andy Warhol creation.

Only ten had ever been made, and many of those had been lost. The price of the bag was currently valued at over $450,000!

Hidden Treasures and Artifacts

Sometimes ancient and antique valuables are buried deep in the Amazon jungle, where only an explorer like Indiana Jones able to retrieve them. And other times, they may just be on the back shelf of your local neighborhood thrift store, waiting for you to pick them up.

For example, a bargain hunter picked up a $20 teapot that he fancied from a small thrifting auction. Only upon further research was it revealed that the simple teapot was one of the first porcelain pieces to have ever been made in the United States, dating back over 250 years. Even though the teapot was damaged, it still managed to net a clean $850,000 at auction a few years later.

An even weirder and more ridiculous find: Nashville resident Michael Sparks found what he believed to be a replica copy of the Declaration of Independence at his local Goodwill and marveled at how well it was done. He purchased it for $2.50 and was on his way.

Only with later research did he find that the copy was not just any replication, but one of the only two-hundred official replications that John Adams himself oversaw back in 1776. Sparks sold the parchment off fast, netting a profit of over $500,000. That’s one weird way to go from rags to riches.

Finding amazing antiques in thrift stores is one of the best parts of the thrifting experience. If you’re looking for reproduced antique items to match your wildest thrift store finds, you can always check out this website.

Art Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

At any thrift store in the country, you’ll likely find a small collection of art tucked away in the corner. Most of these items are old portraits and landscapes owners got sick of hanging on walls, or even custom work that amateur artists managed to pawn off for a small profit.

But sometimes, there’s a true masterpiece waiting to be found. That was definitely true for Robin Darvell, who found a postcard-sized landscape in a box of junk he bought at a thrift store for about $48. That postcard landscape turned out to be a lost work from famed painter John Constable, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Robin is lucky that he didn’t toss the thing away!

An even weirder story is that of a prank gone wrong (or right?). Teri Horton was browsing a thrift store, attempting to find a good gag gift for a friend’s birthday. She stumbled on what she thought to be an incredibly large and incredibly ugly painting– a number of paint splotches tossed over a big canvas.

She purchased it and brought it over to her friend. They got a good laugh about it. Only when a third friend came over did they identify it as a possible work by Jackson Pollock. A fingerprint on the work was scanned and it was positively identified as a work from his studio. Horton is still holding on to the piece today and waiting for the right offer. Talk about one wacky and lucky find!

What Will Be Your Best Thrift Store Finds?

Some of the stories of people’s thrift store finds seem too good to be true. And yet, they are. You really can find some of the strangest and most valuable items in the world lost in the aisles of your local resale store. All you have to do is look. What will be your big find? Only time will tell.

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