Ranked by average value per item across 1,772,400 scans in Flippr, the best sections at the thrift store are video games at $23.48 an item, vinyl at $19.33, books at $16.19, DVDs and movies at $14.48, and CDs at $13.17. Put another way, a 100 item games shelf is sitting on about $2,348 of market value and the same shelf of CDs is sitting on $1,317. Every one of those sections is in the same corner of the store, which is the actual point of this article.
The ranking, and what a full shelf is worth
These are real scans from people standing in stores, not a list I made up. Average estimated value per item, with the share of items that come back at $25 or more:
- Video games: $23.48 average, $15.50 median, 23.9% come back at $25+ (409,729 scans)
- Vinyl records: $19.33 average, $14.00 median, 19.5% at $25+ (34,666 scans)
- Books: $16.19 average, $10.70 median, 11.9% at $25+ (624,167 scans)
- DVDs and movies: $14.48 average, $9.95 median, 9.4% at $25+ (476,372 scans)
- CDs: $13.17 average, $9.71 median, 6.7% at $25+ (227,466 scans)
I re-ran the same query on just the last 90 days, 1,402,578 scans, and the order did not move: games $23.68, vinyl $19.62, books $16.26, movies $14.83, CDs $13.33. This is not a seasonal blip. It is what these sections are.
Vinyl is the best section you will almost never find
Vinyl is second on value per item and dead last on volume. It is 2.0% of every scan in the data, against 35.2% for books and 26.9% for movies. So the practical read is not that you should drive to a thrift store for records. It is that when you do find a crate, work it, because the average record in it is worth more than the average game and roughly one in five will come back at $25 or better.
Books are the opposite. Lowest chance per item of the top three, highest chance you will find hundreds of them. That is why the book aisle is still where most resellers make their money. Volume covers a lot of sins when you can check items quickly.
Inside the book aisle, the section that actually pays is manuals
Category averages only get you to the right aisle. So I went one level down and pulled sold book listings off eBay to see which shelves inside the book section beat the baseline. Over the week of August 3 to 10, 2026, across 37,474 sold book listings, the median book sold for $5.87. Titles containing the word manual medianed $14.38 across 417 sales. That is 2.4 times the baseline.
I checked it on a separate week, July 20 to 27, and got the same answer. 79,931 sold listings, $6.34 median overall, manuals at $13.93 across 542 sales. Repair manuals, shop manuals, service manuals, equipment manuals. They are ugly, nobody puts them on a display table, and they are worth more than almost anything else on the shelf.
The other two that beat the aisle badly in that same week: textbooks at a $19.00 median across 197 sales, and anything with signed in the title at $20.00 across 183 sales.
Two shelves people swear by that the data does not back
Cookbooks medianed $6.11 across 558 sales, against a $5.87 baseline that week. That is 24 cents. Cookbooks are reseller folklore at this point, and yes, a specific Junior League or a first printing Julia Child is worth real money, but the shelf as a shelf is average. You cannot grab cookbooks on sight and expect to be ahead.
The word vintage is worse. Books with vintage in the title medianed $7.16 across 173 sales in a week where the baseline was $6.34. Sellers put that word in titles because they hope it is worth something, which is exactly why it is not a signal.
Why the media aisle is mispriced in the first place
Thrift stores mostly price by category, not by item. A Goodwill public relations director explained the model plainly in a 2023 Kent State NewsLab piece: instead of pricing each donation individually, they set prices per category and adjust based on the market around their stores. That is a completely reasonable way to run a donation-based store, and it is also the reason a $3 shelf can contain a $60 book. Nobody has time to look up 400 paperbacks.
There are a lot of these stores. The Census Bureau counted 18,640 used merchandise stores with paid employees in the US, and NARTS puts the total including nonprofit and consignment shops above 25,000. The media aisle exists in nearly all of them and gets picked over less than the clothing racks.
How I would actually walk a store
- Games first, always. Highest value per item and usually the smallest section, so it costs you five minutes.
- Look for a record crate on the way past. It is rare, but it is the second best section in the data when it exists.
- Books next, and give them the most time, because that is where the volume is.
- In books, hit the manuals, textbooks and anything oversized or technical before the novels.
- DVDs and CDs last. They are real money in bulk but they are the lowest value per item, so they get whatever time is left.
- Scan rather than guess on anything you are unsure about, since the difference between a $4 book and a $40 book is usually invisible.
What this data does not cover
Being straight about it: our data is media. Books, games, movies, CDs, vinyl. I have no numbers on clothing, housewares, furniture, toys or electronics, and those sections make plenty of people plenty of money. If someone tells you the clothing rack beats the book aisle, I cannot argue with them from this dataset. What I can say is that within the media corner of the store, the order above is stable across 1.7 million scans and it held when I checked it again on a shorter window.
One more thing worth saying about the numbers. Selected price is estimated market value, not profit and not a guarantee of a sale. Fees, shipping and the time it takes to list all come out of it, and a $16 book is not $16 in your pocket. The ranking is about where to spend your attention, not what you will bank.
Method: scan figures come from 1,772,400 categorized item scans in Flippr where an estimated value was returned, filtered to values between $0 and $5,000, with a 1,402,578 scan cross-check limited to the last 90 days. Book shelf figures come from sold eBay listings in our books database for the weeks of July 20 to 27 and August 3 to 10, 2026, with sale prices between $0 and $2,000. Medians throughout, and every claim above has at least 150 sales behind it.