If you’ve got extra money burning a hole in your wallet, a new site has popped up that can help you spend that money, and then you can probably sell your wallet. Ransack is a Brooklyn-based online vintage store for none of your needs but maybe some of your wants. As the name would suggest, Ransack is an online repository for curiosities that might come out of general pillaging, or maybe a guy trying to recoup the cost of the locker he bid for on Storage Wars.
The site offers everything from antique-ish pocket knives and cee-lo and poker dice sets to genuinely used clothing. Like, blood stains-used. While some of the offerings seem reasonable in the found-art sense — the $13-$28 pocket knives won’t break your $33 Indian head bank — other offerings are downright ludicrous. A church key (aka bottle and can opener your parents probably have at their house) trades for $8, while this blood stained Budweiser shirt goes for $48! That price better guarantee some sort of infectious disease or Velociraptor DNA on there.
Ransack is sort of an online thrift store, except they’re the ones who have decided just how cool and valuable we should think things are. Pricing aside, isn’t something lost when you remove the thrill of the hunt from vintage clothes shopping? It’s easy to laugh at them selling a blood-stained shirt, but if you found that at the bottom of a $5 bin, you might snatch it up before someone else came along. Isn’t the charm in the fact that it was valued at next to nothing, but you were the one to find it and imbue it with value?
One of my most prized shirts in college was a black short-sleeve button-down that I found for $1 at a thrift store downtown. It was worn in nicely, almost like wearing nothing … and then I found out it was actually a priest’s shirt, which made it invaluable to me.
What say you, Brokesters? Does this site curate the fun and odd or are they trying to manufacture a higher value for a better than average (and more fun) day at the Salvation Army?
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All the awesome stuff seems to be sold out already. :(
I’m sure they’ll be able to restock at least one of the items as soon as the first really drunk Saturday. Keep checking back!
Hi Eric
Thanks for the write up. I guess any attention is good at this point. We are working on restocking now and should have everything that has been sold replaced in the next couple of days. I promise to be sober when I restock.
Oh, that wasn’t meant to be a dig at your frame of mind when pricing. I was referring to having another bloody fight shirt for sale (you know, because people get drunk and get into fights…so I’m told). As I said, I did like some of the items for sale–they just were a little outside the Broke standard we represent here. Thanks for being a good sport, and I hope we were able to direct a little business your way.
Thanks for writing it seriously. I’m sure you get tons of requests for write ups so I am really happy we got the shot.