The game shelf. Across 1,435,131 items Flippr users scanned between May 1 and August 4, 2026, 24.4% of video games came back worth $25 or more. That is one in every four. Vinyl was one in five, books were one in eight, DVDs were one in ten, and CDs were one in fourteen. So if you are asking where to find good things to flip, our data says the aisle you stand in matters more than which store you drove to.
Every aisle, ranked by how often you find something worth $25
These are real scans from real sourcing trips, not a survey. Each number is the share of scanned items that came back with an estimated value of $25 or more, which is roughly the line where an item is worth listing individually instead of bundling it.
- Video games - 24.4% hit $25 or more, or 1 in 4.1 items. Median value $15.73. (329,669 items)
- Vinyl records - 20.5%, or 1 in 4.9 items. Median value $14.65. (31,192 items)
- Books - 12.4%, or 1 in 8.1 items. Median value $10.80. (504,693 items)
- DVDs and Blu-rays - 10.1%, or 1 in 9.9 items. Median value $9.99. (379,793 items)
- CDs - 6.9%, or 1 in 14.5 items. Median value $9.85. (189,784 items)
The gap gets wider as the money gets bigger. At $50 or more, games hit on 1 in 16 items and CDs hit on 1 in 67. At $100 or more, games hit on 1 in 60 and CDs on 1 in 222. A CD wall takes you three and a half times as long to work through as a game shelf for the same payoff.
One thing to keep in mind on vinyl: 31,192 items is the smallest sample of the five, so treat that 20.5% as directionally right rather than precise. Books, movies, and games all have hundreds of thousands of scans behind them.
Saturday is the worst day to source, and it is not close
This one surprised me. Saturday is the classic sourcing day. It is also the day with the lowest hit rate in our data. Saturday scans came back worth $25 or more only 13.3% of the time. Tuesday was the best day at 14.6%. Every other day of the week landed between those two.
Saturday also had the most scanning activity of any day at 221,206 items. That is the explanation. More resellers in the store means the shelf has already been worked over by the time most people get there. The same pattern shows up by hour. The 10am to 3pm block, which is peak store traffic, had the lowest hit rates of the day at 12.7% to 13.3%.
The difference is not huge in percentage terms, about 10% relative. But it is free. Going Tuesday morning instead of Saturday afternoon costs you nothing and puts you in front of a shelf fewer people have picked through.
Where to actually go, and what each place is good for
Our data tells you which aisle pays. It does not tell you which store to drive to, because we do not track location. So here is the practical version based on what the numbers imply plus what actually holds up in the field.
Regular thrift stores are the default for a reason. There are more than 25,000 resale, consignment, and nonprofit resale shops in the US according to the trade association, and the good ones restock daily. That daily restock is the whole point. A store you can hit twice a week beats a better store two hours away.
Outlet bins, the by-the-pound Goodwill stores, are the cheapest media in the country and almost nobody uses them for media. Bins pricing runs roughly $1.49 to $2.49 a pound depending on region. A DVD case weighs about three ounces. That works out to around 30 cents a disc. Given a 10.1% chance of a $25 hit on DVDs, buying discs at 30 cents each is a completely different math problem than buying them at $2 each.
Books are the exception at the bins. A hardcover can run a pound and a half, so you are paying $2 to $4 a book, which is thrift store pricing without the sorting. For books, Friends of the Library sales are better. They price by the bag or the box, they are staffed by volunteers who are not pricing to market, and the inventory is donated estate libraries, which is where the textbooks and niche nonfiction come from.
Estate sales are where the game and vinyl numbers actually pay off. Estates are the only place you routinely find a complete collection instead of leftovers. Somebody's whole PS2 shelf, somebody's whole record crate. The last day of an estate sale is usually half off, and media is what nobody else at the sale came for.
Garage sales are high variance and slow. The margin is great when it works because people price to make things go away, not to make money. But you can burn a whole Saturday morning on four stops. If you go, go for the ones advertising a collection or a move, not the ones advertising kids clothes.
The math that tells you whether a store is worth going back to
Here is the useful way to use the hit rates above. Pick your category, look up the $25 hit rate, and that tells you how many items you need to get through per good find. Games: about four. Books: about eight. CDs: about fourteen.
Now time yourself. If it takes you four seconds an item to check a CD wall, fourteen items is about a minute per $25 find, and that is before you account for the ones that do not sell. If you are checking one item at a time and a store has three hundred CDs, that is twenty minutes for maybe twenty dollars of profit. That is the real reason to scan a whole shelf at once instead of one spine at a time.
If you only have one hour
Go on a weekday. Walk straight to games, then vinyl, then books. Scan those three sections as whole shelves. Skip the CD wall entirely unless the store prices CDs under a dollar or you can see boxed sets and box art from the 80s and 90s. Then leave.
Most people do not struggle to find things to flip because there is nothing good out there. They struggle because they spend their hour in the section with the worst odds. The data is pretty clear about which section that is.