Thrift Store Junkie: Salt Lake City, UT

Today I explore several unique stores offering discounted merchandise in the Salt Lake City area. Conveniently, most of the interesting stores I found were all centrally located in or around the warehouse district in SLC, near the intersection of the I-15 and I-80 freeways. Some of the products on offer are second hand, but there are some interesting options for “new in the original packaging” items.

You can easily visit all four of these places I describe in a single day with lots of time to search for the perfect treasures. Two of them are within walking distance of each other!

This is one in a series of articles that explores unique and interesting sources for discounted items. Whether it be a traditional thrift store or resellers that have access to new items at favorable prices, I’ll explore the most interesting collections on offer in a certain locale.

NPS

I’m not sure what ‘NPS’ actually stands for, but they have a cute sign on their consumer products outlet store that says “nice place to save” as a tagline. NPS is fairly unusual in the “let’s not pay retail” market because they are a reseller of distressed freight. So whatever reason that new merchandise didn’t get sold through the original channel, NPS gets a good price on inventory and passes that on to buyers.

What this means in practice is that you never can tell what they are going to have but it is a VERY wide range of products. They have arranged the merchandise into three big spaces:

• Consumer durable products: home decor, beauty & health products, crafts, dishware, costume jewelry, and so on. There even is a little section in the back of the store with designer labels.
• Consumer perishable goods: cookies, crackers, snacks, and other food items. Everything I saw was pre-packaged merchandise from a manufacturer. Their were brand names you’d recognize and also smaller brands.
• Industrial products: tools, small appliances like air purifiers, landscaping products, plumbing parts, exercise equipment, shelving, flooring products – really too many diverse things to describe well.

The consumer products area had many aisles like this, full of skin care and health products. Discounts seemed to vary, but were sometimes about 50% of MSRP.

Got Tape? If not, you could buy it by the Gaylord boxful. This was in the pallet auction area, so there is a bidding system to buy the entire pallet. See the feature picture of this article to see other pallets that were on auction when I visited the Industrial products store.

This was an example of a discount on one item. Do the math and it comes to a 40% discount.

There was an area with new clothing and accessories (like sox) where everything was $5.

While I did not find anything that I needed during my visit, this seems like a great resource for people who have just moved into a new place and need “all the stuff”. There were sections of the store with inexpensive furniture, shelves, household cleaning products, air filters and humidifiers, landscape products, tools, those thermoses that are trending right now and more. While not quite thrift store prices, the pricing seemed more than fair considering that most stuff was new. The parking lots were full when I visited and folks were definitely hauling out full cartloads of stuff.

Goodwill Outlet

This is one of Goodwill’s thrift stores where everything is just sold by the pound. I think this is a very unique way to price things in the world of thrifting. Buy more and the price per pound goes down. Everything is laid out on shallow tables (on wheels) so that it is easy to pick through. Things that don’t sell at regular Goodwill stores make their way to an Outlet to have one more chance to get in the reuse stream.

This was a very popular place! There were people sorting through every single table in the store. The staff bring out new tables on a schedule (remember that I mentioned wheels above?) and folks apparently spend hours at the store sorting through goods and waiting for the next batch of tables to come out. There were dozens of folks with nearly full shopping carts lined up on the back wall of the store waiting for the next chance at good deals. One word of warning, if you are highly sensitive to smells, this may not be the place for you. In general, things were fine, but there were a couple of tables that had something pungent in the mix.

Described in a few words …	Picker’s Paradise
Best thing I bought	Two bags of stuffed toys for my dogs to shred – about $4 worth of fun.
Prices	$1.99 per pound, cheaper once you bought 25 pounds, and another price break 50 pounds. A web search indicates that price per pound varies from location to location, so take this as only a general guide to pricing.
Discounts	At 25 pounds and 50 pounds of stuff bought at a single time.
Location	1850 W 1500 S, Salt Lake City UT This is literally just down the street from NPS.
Parking	Lots of free parking – warehouse lot

Deseret Industries

Deseret Industries is a hometown institution in Salt Lake City. They provide a wide range of community services in their faith-based mission, and their Thrift Store is just one of the ways that they both employ people and provide discounted goods to the local population. You can see from my photo that they also seem to have sources for some new goods: all of those new colored T Shirts were available in multiple sizes, for example.

ReStore – Habitat for Humanity of Salt Lake City

I have a fondness for the ReStore concept, as it helps keep a great deal of used but reusable building materials out of our landfills. The Salt Lake City location was somewhat of an exception to other ReStores thrift stores that I have visited because a larger percentage of items were new in the original packaging. It seems that this store might be the beneficiary of a large national distribution chain that needs to unload merchandise that they have no time to sell themselves. Examples of things I saw included new exercise equipment, a new large dog crate, new housewares, new furnace air filters, a new pool table still in the crate, new patio umbrellas and more.

This location was large, so they had a good selection of used furniture and a large lighting department. There was an attempt at organization/departmentalization, but they seem to be overwhelmed by merchandise and having a hard time keeping up with all of it. The next time you are in Salt Lake, maybe you can help them by taking something new home at a nice price. The shims are just to the left of the air filters.

Other Thrift Store Junkie Locations

• Thrifting in SW Denver
• Thrifting in Glenwood Springs, Colorado (but think “Aspen”)
• Thrifting in Oakland and Berkeley, California
• More locations coming soon …

Thinking about getting started with Thrifting? I explain why you should join all of us in the ‘reuse’ economy with my article: Benefits of Thrifting – Top 10 Reasons for Thrift Shopping.