Thrift Store Shopping Regionally - Deseret Industries and Savers

I live in Utah and we have two major thrift stores that are basically chain stores.

One is Deseret Industries that is owned by the Mormon or LDS Church

and The other is Savers which is a charity thrift store and by far my favorite.

I will go into the pros and cons of each store in my opinion

Deseret Industries is a great store and yes I have found great finds but I find their prices to be very high and each store is not consistent in price. I frequent three of these stores. One is 30 miles north, one is five miles west and one is 17 miles south of me.

I go to each one for different reasons.

My first stop is crafts. I look for kits, yarns, patterns etc.  I then head to collectibles to see if they might have something that the other hundreds of eBay sellers might have missed in their daily stops at these stores. I then go to books and look for patterns and other unusual books.  Then I scan china, holiday and then head to the outdoor area for larger items.

It is not unusual to find books in DI (as we call it here) to be 10 to 20 dollars and then end up in the landfill because they can't be recycled.  The management will tell you they send to other DI stores before they go to the landfill but workers have told me that they dump countless red bins (their large trashcans) into the dumpster daily.   I have a hard time giving a store a lot of money for an item when I think they could lower their price before dumping in the landfill but they are greedy and won't do it. It is not part of their philosophy.  They need to follow Saver's philosophy.   The bright person behind this concept at Saver's deserves a medal.

Saver's pricing.   I might see something at Savers I want but think it is too much... I have a few options?
1. I can buy it then because I want it so badly.
2. I can wait for it to go 50% off in about five weeks and hope no one found it!
3. I can wait for it to go to 99 cents in six weeks and pray no one found it during the half off sale.

Here is how it works.   Savers uses a different color sticker each week.  So everything that comes in that week might be green.  The next week will be Purple.    There are five colors.  The items are put out at the full asking price.  Each week a new color is 50% off for the week. They rotate the colors of the stickers so that about every five weeks the next color is on sale.  After the 50% off sale the following Monday that color sticker goes to 99 cents.  No matter the cost of the item.     So can you imagine the landfill dumping from this company?  Almost nil!  Except of course for the junk that people drop off thinking is a treasure and Saver's can't sell it because it is just that ... Junk..

So my favorite is Savers for helping with keeping stuff out of landfills and for their great sales.