great salvation army, goodwill, and other thrift store record bins you have known

I've been working at Goodwill as part of a Work Evaluation program (since DOL has been fruitless trying to get me a job). Goodwill plays the best music ever. Like all my favorite AA classics. And they even play stuff that doesn't get radio play. Like Genesis - Paperlate

If you're in NYC, I recommend going to the Housing Works Bookstore near the Broadway-Lafayette MTA stop. Taylor Swift somewhat famously shot a video there, but they have a modest section of records, CD's and Blu-rays worth going through. Prices are flat - $2 for CD's, $5 for Blu-rays, etc. I donate my CD's there and I just unloaded a bunch of stuff in a periodic attempt to keep my library from growing too much. Mostly redundant copies of albums I already own, i.e. good stuff (at least to me), so if they put it out on the shelves, you should see the Band's brown album (the 2000 remaster), an old CD of Steely Dan's Pretzel Logic, and a bunch of other titles.

When I first got interested in thrifting in the 80s there was a Goodwill in an ancient building with creaky wooden floors. Downstairs were dozens of musty smelling cardboard boxes of records: Ventures, Louis Prima, Julie London, and lots of those Provocative Percussion-type easy listening albums were among my first “retro” purchases.

Later, when the Incredibly Strange Music books came out and gave me grails to search for, I found my copy of Leda Annest’s album, still one of my favorite weirdo exotica finds. Sadly, the store is long gone. The forlorn street it was on is now heavily Hispanic, and the Goodwill is now a Mexican grocery.

https://www.discogs.com/master/526076-Leda-Annest-Phil-Moore-Portrait-Of-Leda

Dropped off more stuff and checked the racks - didn’t see anything from last week’s drop so maybe it’s still being processed. Someone’s clearly going through the CD’s though and buying quite a bit as stuff I would have gotten if I hadn’t already owned copies are mostly gone.