Saturday was a new record for me. 20 thrift shops in a day. In Las Vegas, they’re mostly grocery store sized, so where I’m used to a half dozen racks of men’s stuff, these came through with aisle after aisle. Hundreds of suits and jackets all in one place, shirts as far as the eye can see, and decent prices for the large part. I realize Las Vegas is a relatively new town with a transient population, but I hoped it would be a numbers game- 20 shops, thousands of things at each of them, bound to be some vintage in there somewhere. It turned out I was half right. There was no shortage of early ’60s overcoats, tweeds, plaid cotton, largely small collared, fly fronted and raglan sleeved. One or two in nearly every store. Unfortunately, many were stained or moth damaged, and most of the stores were asking $20-$30 for them. This may not seem like much, but the current overcoat market is bad. I could put one of those in the eBay store at $10 and it would probably go unsold for a year. The local vintage shops won’t touch them at any price. Usually it stands that where there is one piece of vintage, more are lurking, waiting to be found. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, and my entire sellable haul from the day’s thrifting was a single necktie, which goodwill had priced at $4, about eight times what I’m used to paying for thrift shop ties.

After picking Alex up from the photo conference, we met up with Jason T. Smith, star of Spike TV’s “Thrift Hunters”, “Thrifty Business with Jay and Nay”, “Thrifting With the Boys”, etc. at Frankie’s Tiki Room. I compared my experience with my aborted vintage-picking TV show with his two seasons in reality TV, we talked the state of thrifting, eBay sales and how people like us have ruined thrifting for everyone by divulging its mysterious ways. You couldn’t hope to meet nicer people than he and his wife.

So far, the haul stands at a ’40s English summer suit, a turn of the century sack suit, Hollyvogue tie, vintage Notre Dame Athletics shirt, pair of vintage eyeglasses and a vintage patch.
We made it into Salt Lake City last night only to find we’re due to catch the edge of a potentially 3 foot snowfall. We’ll try to keep it brief here and head west before things hit.