Online resellers scour NH shops in hope of big sales

The great American treasure hunt is on, with an electronic twist. People with bar code scanners and/or photo apps are now ubiquitous at thrift and secondhand stores. They’re looking to resell brick-and-mortar finds online. Being an entrepreneur has never been easier.

“Collecting is about the hunt,” a traditional antiquarian New York City bookseller said in the 2019 movie, “The Booksellers.”

“The internet has killed the hunt.” App users beg to differ about the hunt being dead. They say the hunt is bigger than ever and with more competition. Only the playing field has changed.

Gone are the days of thumbing through thousands of catalogue pages to learn the finer points of a first edition of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Apps can’t provide a complete education, but they are a useful crash course.

While 62 percent of all book sales now online, the scanner set focuses on bar codes. ISBN (International Standard Book Numbers) came into being in the mid-1970s with bar codes following. Most brick-and-mortar bookstores have formed an uneasy peace with selling online. Some have fully embraced an online presence.

The Henniker Book Farm now sees more than half of its sales generated online, while Old Number Six Book Depot, a browser’s paradise and also in Henniker, is in-store only.

Dennis Mounce has a steady part-time job delivering Mission tortillas and wraps to New Hampshire grocery stores. With ambitions to have a dog-training business and a newly adopted 15-year-old son, however, Mounce devotes Tuesdays to book scouting in five or six thrift stores. He makes good money on his day “off.”

Mounce points to the hidden costs of selling to Amazon, however, no surprise in dealing with Jeff Bezos. The Amazon scanning app he uses costs $45 a month, and he has to pay to ship his finds via Media Mail to Amazon, typically in lots from 70 to 125 books. There are also shipping supplies and the printing of personalized labels to put over bar codes. Amazon also charges a small monthly fee for unsold items.

Is Mounce a bookseller? The vast majority of traditionalists would say no.

Like most Americans, he admits to not being a reader, though he does shop for his son, recently finding a book on the hockey player Bobby Orr for him. Someone has to feed the belly of the Amazon beast, and Mounce points to books, often readily found in new condition, as being cheap to buy. Strictly from a business and time standpoint, it makes sense for him to sell to Amazon. No bookseller tweed jacket with elbow patches needed.

Mounce recently found a $200 book on model cars, but his bread and butter is buying books for a dollar and selling them to Amazon for approximately five dollars each.

Amazon’s FBA program (Fulfillment by Amazon) allows sellers like Mounce to distance themselves from the content of a book, an idea anathema to traditional book dealers.

Amazon stocks the book and ships the book, paying the seller when the book is ordered. Worldwide, Amazon has 2 million people in their FBA program.

eBay has a scale of fees and typically takes 14 percent off the top of each sale. As the site’s sellers are generally shipping only single items, the shipping costs per item are much higher. eBay seller expertise varies, but their feedback system offers a public report card. If you don’t know the difference between a hardcover first edition and a paperback first printing, buyers will quickly let you know.

Hooksett’s Laurie Guilette enjoyed thrifting with her mom for home essentials when she was a young mother with two children. She’s currently juggling two jobs with what she calls an “addiction”: thrifting to resell.

Guilette has only been a serious online seller for three years and calls her Hooksett storage unit “a work in progress,” but it’s obvious she has an excellent eye for collector glass and jewelry. Her storage unit has shelves and sections that would put some museums to shame.

“A Crazy Lamp Lady YouTube video got me started,” Guilette said. “It opened my eyes to different things in thrift stores. “I use Google Search to price Carnival, Depression, Pyrex, Viking and L.E. Smith glass, among others.

I have books to learn and recognize different patterns, but it’s a game-changer to see the exact item on eBay or Etsy and to know what it’s selling for. I can’t even imagine how it was before.”

A recent find for Guilette was a Tiffany & Co. sterling bangle bracelet that she bought for 50 cents and will list for $200 to $250. She recently bought a 15-pound bag of jewelry from an online auction for $18 plus $22 shipping and says silver and even gold finds are not rare in such lots.

Why?

Major thrift chains such as Goodwill and Super Savers have seen donations skyrocket from Covid-era cleaning, while workdays lost to Covid and the labor shortage have greatly impacted their ability to sort items coming in. A 2020 Bloomberg Businessweek article was titled, “At Overloaded Thrift Stores, Coronavirus is Wreaking Havoc.”

A 2019 New York Times article pointed to “decision fatigue” by one decluttering author as the reason many people dump estates into dozens of plastic trash bags and donate them just to be done with the whole thing. The 12 stores that comprise Northern New England Goodwill spent $1.2 million on trash removal in 2020. The sheer volume of what comes through the donation dock assures that many items with value get overlooked. Guilette recently found a travel bar set for a few dollars with tags still on it from the 1950s. She estimates it’s worth $100 to $150.

Brenda Sliwerski operates Hooksett’s Corey’s Closet thrift store with her husband John and their adult son Corey. Corey is cognitively impaired, and about half of the staff of 15 have some type of disability. The nonprofit thrift, which benefits people like Corey, was named Reader’s Choice “Best Thrift Store in New Hampshire” by the NH Union Leader. The store was also profiled in a recent “New Hampshire Chronicle” episode.

Hooksett’s Laurie Guilette with two recent finds: A Norcrest head vase from the 1950s and a Tiffany & Co. sterling bangle bracelet. (Photo by John Angelo)

Sliwerski uses Google Lens, a free app that identifies items by picture, to price unique donations.

“We’re so busy, we don’t have time to list a lot, and we do like customers to find better things once in a while,” she said. “Our line for trying to sell it on eBay is $75 and that does narrow it down.”

The store’s largest sections are clothing and housewares, but virtually anything can come through the donation dock.

“We got a 1970s Flowbee brand new in the box with different attachments,” Sliwerski explained. “It vacuums up your hair and cuts it. We sold it for like $125 on eBay and that was pre-Covid. During Covid, I probably could have tripled that,” she chuckled.

Pricewise, a pair of donations stand out according to her. Corey’s Closet has a Fendi leather handbag on consignment with The RealReal in New York City, priced at $550.

New Fendis can exceed $3,000.

The thrift store also received a scrapbook put together by a North Carolina couple who sailed back from Europe in 1955 on the ill-fated liner Andrea Doria. Less than a year later, the Italian cruise ship collided in dense fog off the coast of Nantucket with the Norwegian ship Stockholm. Forty-six crew members and passengers of the Andrea Doria were killed.

While the SS Andrea Doria sits on the bottom of the ocean, the scrapbook contained a rich slice of the history of the liner. It included menus, tickets, cocktail napkins, sheets of daily activities and pictures of the traditional Captain’s Dinner for first-class passengers. It sold for $300 on eBay.

More typically, signed pottery, designer clothes and vintage housewares can prove valuable.

One interesting recent donation was a certified chip of coal from the SS Titanic, perhaps indicating that what goes down can come up.

“If you look at something and say, ‘Who would buy that?’ I think that’s your eBay market,” Sliwerski concluded with a laugh.