A man in Phoenix is $34,994 richer after he found a rare 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre diving watch at Goodwill on sale for a meager $5.99.
Back in high school my friends and I were all about going to Goodwill to find that ‘Great White Buffalo’ of apparel. Mostly we’d be looking for throwback 80’s gear, like hypercolor shirts and Starter jackets, but never did it occur to us that there might be actual value lurking somewhere within the racks of Goodwill. HOLY CRAP were we wrong.
AZFamily’s Karen Brown is reporting that Zach Norris of Phoenix, Arizona flipped the $5.99 Goodwill purchase into $35,000 after he listed it on the watch trading site Hodinkee, and a collector purchased the timepiece for $35,000 (he also threw in a $4,000 Mega Speed Master to entice Mr. Norris to sell him the rare artifact).
A Phoenix man found quite the thrift store treasure at the Goodwill at 43rd Avenue and Thunderbird Road. He bought a watch for $5.99 then turned around and sold it for $35,000.
And now, after lying low for a few weeks, Zach Norris is talking about his find and what he’s doing with all that cash.
“I’ve found some stuff in the past that I have been really excited about and stoked, but this is one of those things you’re like, one day, one day it will happen, and it happened for me,” Norris said.
Norris collects watches but had gone into the Goodwill looking for a golf pull cart. He happened to take a look in the watch section and found a rare 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre diving watch with a tag that read $5.99.
“I didn’t even want to give it to her to scan,” he said. “I was like, you can scan it in my hand if you want to. I just didn’t want to let it go.”
He explains how Goodwill could have missed the rare gem.
“Sometimes they just miss it, they don’t know,” Norris said. “It’s not a very fancy-looking piece. You have to know what it is.”
Norris said there were only about 900 of the diving watches ever made.
“I knew I didn’t want to keep it because it’s kind of above my means to have a piece like that,” Norris said. “I had a couple of good offers.”
After his find ended up on Hodinkee.com, a watch collectors website, a collector in San Francisco bought the watch for $35,000 and threw in a $4,000 Mega Speed Master watch to sweeten the deal.
And so what has Norris been doing with his unexpected windfall?
“We are planning a wedding,” he said. “We’ve been planning a wedding for a while, but now that we have the extra funds we’re going to go ahead and start taking care of everything. We’re excited.”
He also donated some of his profits back to the Goodwill.
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Good on him for donating a little back to Goodwill. They’re an organization renowned for getting people back on their feet by providing the otherwise unemployable with jobs. If anyone can use a little bit of charity, it’s Goodwill. So I’m stoked that he’d toss them back a little chunk of his asinine profits.
And I’m not going to lie to you, part of me wants to head on down to the nearest Goodwill right now and see what sort of items I can find to flip. Maybe even launch a column about flipping things from Goodwill on Ebay, because people will buy anything. Suddenly my mind is swirling with dreams of that dude who flipped a paperclip into a HOUSE.
via AZ Family