Several of the coffee shops around here sell that sort of thing. These New Puritans records for £40. Who the fuck cares about that stuff?
And all the ‘vintage’ shops that just go round every charity shop buying anything recognisable, or with decent art, and selling them for a ten-times mark-up to people who don’t know what they are. Beyond a bit of ‘records = old = valuable’ thinking.
When I worked in the shop some customer told me all about the original Beatles records they had… Passed down from their dad, who bought them at the time. Dude was so smug that he had a pile of records that sold literally millions of copies.
The charity shops seem to have similar records, Simon and Garfunkel etc. If you’re ever in Sheffield Record Collector is a great shop in Broomhill. Currently in the process of cleaning all my records after them being stored at my parents for years. John Stammers first album is a highlight. My brother got a free turntable and speakers free with a job lot of vinyl from Ebay.
Heres one that’s been annoying me. All images in Facebook android are highly compressed and low Res.
Viewing the same content on an iPhone everything is crystal clear and hi Res. There’s no settings for this and no explanation.
I barely use Facebook so it isn’t a big deal, It only really annoys me when ColdwarSteve uploads a new image and I zoom in to try and find Cilla and I realise I’m staring at jpeg compression hell.
I recall seeing a job ad years back for Oxfam where they were looking a regional stock manager who would be good at researching random donations and making sure they’d research the products on ebay before putting them on sale for a not-charity-shop-level fee.
Randomly, my girlfriend found an Alvar Aalto vase for £5 in a local charity shop in Bristol - they normally go for about £150, so we treat it as more important than life itself.
I’ve also seen loads of Gplan sideboards and furniture units at ridiculously low prices in UK charity shops, but over here they’re super rare and usually only found in specialist mid-century dealers, who then charge £500 for something you’d see for £100 in an Age Action warehouse. That’s definitely a cultural difference though.
My girlfriend is amazing at charity shopping. Basically every item she owns is designer, and we furnished our entire flat for basically free as well, Gplan, mid century stuff etc. I don’t have the patience for it and just prefer to throw money at stuff but she’s got a good eye and it’s a cool hobby for her because she could probably turn a profit on it if she didn’t want to keep it all!
Took her to a car boot once and we got two of these wicked chairs for 30 quid, realised we had nowhere to put the other one so she sold it for 150 ha
Niiiice!! Good work on the fireplace too. Mine needs work in the MCM vein. Yours seems to look like what my folks had in the 70s.
Used to live near Clifton in Bristol and often found some banging furniture on the street too. Favourite piece was an old, wall-hung kitchen cabinet for plates, bowls, etc., which by itself is fairly ugly, but the frosted glass sliding doors, along with with some teal detailing really works in our place. Picked it up off the street 3 doors down the day we moved in - turned out the old owners had bought their house a month or so previously and spent the time refurbishing it from 10 bedsits or 1 beds (2 per floor) into a single family Georgian terrace. We use it for shoes now. Stoked on that.
