This is us, being picky.

Welcome back to the shed. Friday’s haul came home in two kitchen garbage bags — and the bags were the price, not the carrier. $5 a bag at a fill-a-bag sale, and the seller’s only criteria were that you had to be able to carry them and tie them shut. Stretchy Glad bags, not the Walmart-checkout-bag kind that fit a few things. We could’ve stuffed them more full and chose not to, because we got everything we wanted and then some.

This post walks through the whole Friday route — the $10 we spent on two bags of craft supplies, the rest of what we picked up across the day, and the math on why the bag sale is basically free inventory if we don’t overthink it.

The fill-a-bag sale — $10 total, two bags

We’ve been to plenty of fill-a-bag sales. Usually it’s a Walmart-style plastic bag that holds maybe a few items if you’re careful. This one handed you a kitchen-size Glad bag with stretch in it, took $5, and said go.

The bag-to-shed inventory:

• Needlepoint kits — six of the little miniature ones, headed for one combined lot
• Embroidery thread, ribbon, buttons — the kind of supplies craft sellers buy by the box
• Yarn — a real pile of it; getting lotted by category
• A vintage Harajuku Mini pencil case — tag still on it, going to bundle with last week’s Harajuku Mini buy
• Doll furniture and a small Vanna White / Wheel of Fortune piece — random fillers

I’d rather do this than buy a scratch-off ticket. [0:23] walks up to the sale; [2:46] is paying for both bags.

The strategy on this stuff is the simplest version of what we do: we’re not trying to maximize money on it. We bought it because at $10 in we cannot lose, and the only way we make a mistake is by spending too much time listing it individually. Big box lots of crafting supplies, sorted into makes-sense categories — yarn together, buttons together, needlepoint kits together — and priced like a craft-store clearance run. The customer wins, we move it fast, the listing time per dollar stays sane.

The Frye boots — $10 (the deal of the day)

Different sale, different morning, same haul. Candice spotted Frye boots on a $20 price tag. The lady running the sale walked up while we were still looking and said everything was half price — so the Fryes came home for $10. [9:38].

You don’t see good-condition Frye boots for $10. They’ve been worn — there’s some dirt on the bottoms — but not worn. The tread is barely touched. Whoever owned them took care of them. Frye sells well for us across the board; comparable used pairs in this condition typically clear $80–120 on eBay depending on style, and we’ll list these accordingly once we get them photographed.

The same sale also gave us the Pioneer Woman throw blankets at $2.50 a whack [11:34] — half-priced too, originally $5. Pioneer Woman throws comp around $25–30 apiece, and Candice has a soft spot for the line because most of our dishes at the house are Pioneer Woman. Easy money on these, and we didn’t even have to ask for the discount.

The shoe department — four pairs across the day

Lonnie’s keeper hit-rate on shoes is normally very low. This haul made him work for it.

• Frye boots — $10. Already covered. The headline.
• Hoka women’s 6 — $6. Almost didn’t buy them because of the size, but the sole on these is unreal wide. Great walking shoe for a small-foot buyer. [10:04].
• Under Armour tactical boots — $5. Lace-up with a side zipper — what cops and security wear when they need to get in and out fast.
• Adidas Alpha Bounce — $3. Lonnie’s size. We’ll comp them, and Lonnie may or may not have a decision to make about whether they go in inventory or on his feet. (He almost never asks Candice if shoes are good. He asked Candice about these.)

The rest of the haul

A walk through the smaller pickups:

• Waxed canvas backpack with leather straps — $10. Heavy-duty, unbranded, has a hidden laptop compartment under the flap. [5:42]. Lonnie’s keeper. (You might as well steal from your unlisted inventory.)
• Enjoi skateboard deck — $3. New-condition deck, never had trucks on it; some paint loss from storage but no use damage. Comps on Enjoi decks land around $50–60 for standard graphics, more for limited editions.
• Prince Royal O3 tennis racket — $3. Grip needs replacing — they always do — and we always disclose that. We’ve sold this exact racket before; it’s crazy lightweight and moves at a fair price once the grip’s fresh.
• Food Lovers 12-Day Transformation diet kit — $10 for the kit and the matching plates. The kit (DVDs, diary, audio, books) and the plate set were sold separately at the sale and Candice couldn’t find the plates at first, so this was a small gamble buying both pieces. Estimated value with the plates: about $30, and our money’s on bundling them.
• Two vintage Bibles — $1 a whack. A Holman ultra-thin reference Bible with a flexible cover, and a small Tyndale compact. The Holman has the right feel — flexible covers move better than rigid ones in the Bible market.
• Pink Floyd hat — $4. Officially licensed, 1973 tour reprint, made in 2024. [11:11]. Not a high-dollar piece, but it was cool and we like cool. A T-shirt folder thing was thrown in with it that we asked for — that one’s going in our packing setup once we figure out how the thing actually works (might be a short later).
• Newsboys band drumsticks — $2. Niche but a real category — tour-merch drumsticks have a small, dedicated buyer base.
• A first-party battery for a weed eater — $1. Sourcing a battery for Lonnie’s mom; not inventory, just a household win.

The DVD lot — hundreds of titles in binder sleeves for $10

Different category, deserves its own paragraph. [13:17].

Hundreds of DVDs — the kind of pile that took the previous owner years to curate, then came out at a garage sale because she was moving. The cover and the disc, in alphabetical-ish order, all in nice binder sleeves. Not in clamshells. If they’d been in clamshells, we wouldn’t have bought them — clamshells turn a buyable lot into a storage problem.

The plan: shoot a one-minute scrolling video of all the titles, list the whole pile for $100 on eBay, and ship media mail. The buyer gets a giant DVD library that doesn’t need a shelf, and we move $10 of inventory for fast money. We left a little money on the table by not parting them out — but parting out a thousand DVDs is exactly the kind of thing the rule about not spending too much time exists for.

The lesson — the bag sale isn’t a haul, it’s a strategy

Most fill-a-bag sales aren’t worth a stop because the bag is small and the inventory is picked over. This one had two things going for it: the bag was actually a kitchen garbage bag with stretch, and the seller’s “carry it and close it” rules let us stuff them.

Once we paid the $10, the math flipped. From that point on, every minute we spent listing this stuff individually was a tax against our own profit. Big lots, sensible categories, fast listings, customer wins on price. The reseller mistake on a buy this cheap isn’t paying too much — it’s getting precious about it.

The Frye boots and Pioneer Woman blankets are the per-item headline numbers, and they came from a different sale at half price because the seller offered. The DVDs are a $90-spread gamble on a single $100 listing. And the bag-sale supplies are a slow-bleed inventory layer that funds itself the first lot we move.

We had a really good time on Friday, y’all. Thanks for coming along on the haul. We’ll see y’all in the next one.