And I Thought the Goodwill Was Cheap

We are Goodwill converts.  Ten years ago if you would have told me I would even enter the door of the Goodwill I would have said "ick" and "no way".  But after seeing how much money we can save shopping at this thrift store and how cool the items are (name brands and high dollar items if you were to buy the things at the mall), we rarely shop anywhere else these days.

So imagine our surprise when we found out that our city now has a Goodwill clearance center.  We went to check it out today and found that this is an even better (read cheaper) way to shop for some items.  The place is a huge warehouse filled with bins of stuff.  The items aren't neatly arranged and cleaned up.  In fact it looks like a backhoe picked up stuff by the cart-full and dropped them into the dozen or so bins that filled the store.  So we jumped into the fray and came away with the following: 2 long sleeve Gap shirts, 1 pair Billabong swim trunks, one waist pack for walking (that I couldn't find anywhere...this one is exactly what I was looking for!), one padded envelope, one pair of sweatpants for lounging around the house, and a very cool curtain that matches our living room decor perfectly.  All of this for a grand total of $3.60!  They sell stuff by the pound and apparently we bought three pounds of stuff.
We will definitely add this to our shopping rounds each week (and also get there early as the people we saw at the store today looked like professional resalers (they had gloves on to search through the bins, raced from bin to bin quickly identifying stuff they wanted, and were buying huge carts of stuff for pennies on the dollar).

If you have a Goodwill clearance center in your area, it is definitely worth the trip to check it out!