PSA that you will never find any hidden gems at Goodwill ever again. Goodwill started an e-commerce website and they have people in the back who sort through everything and anything of any value is sent to e-commerce and appraised and sold at auction.
So the days of going to goodwill and finding cool stuff are over, it's all just dead people's clothes now. Support your local thrift stores by going there instead
It's a lot more rare for sure. Some still do have nice stuff, but it's much, much more of shitshow than it used to be. Unfortunately not many independent thrift stores around me, and the few that are generally have nice deals even less often than goodwill.
I remember I used to see xboxes and PlayStations on the shelves frequently. In the last year I've seen 2 wiis, 1 wii u, and 1 Xbox 360. No computers anymore. No cool software. The shelves are getting more barren.
Only stuff I like in some thrift store is power supply/adapter. Say I need for a project or to replace faulty one, a 8.4V 300mA wallwart? a 15VAC one? etc, just go in the bin at the thrift store, some are 1$ or 2$ It's dull I know.
I got my D&D Basic box set from a charity shop, £2.50. There's one going for over £150 on ebay right now. Got my Baldur's Gate box set from a charity shop too for £2.50. I also got Flash 4 (I think) for a couple of quid, it was selling second hand on amazon for about £200, but I was an anxious, clueless kid and was too scared to sell it.
Yesterday I got some squishmallows for my niece at £1 each. We still get good stuff here.
Even here, some like Oxfam will save the more valuable stuff to sell on ebay. I worked at two charity shops back in my twenties, so I got to the good stuff first haha. The Baldur's Gate was lucky because another customer was going to buy it for her son, but changed her mind when she saw the age rating, and I was like, bagsy this!