When I got married, saving money became my top priority, so I started to pay more attention to second-hand stores. Besides monthly open-air flea markets in Japan, many shops buy and sell second-hand goods.

When I was a student, I did visit some second-hand clothing stores near the school. Later, I found out that besides old clothes, many other items are also for sale: strollers, toys, pianos, washing machines, etc. The stuff in these shops is old, but the quality is still quite good. If you put in enough effort, you can find many "top shelf" items at a good price.

It was not until now did I have the opportunity to try selling used items, and it was a rather strange experience during my time in Japan. The used items I wanted to sell were: 1 humidifier, 1 microwave oven, 1 scale, 1 trolley, and 1 large box of clothes.

I wanted to sell them to the Bookoff near my house, whereas my husband wanted to sell them to a less famous second-hand shop further away. I browsed Bookoff's website and saw that they would come to my house to collect the items and then pay via bank transfer. It seems that they collect anything that is still usable. You can browse Bookoff's website for more information.

That time, I excitedly brought a bunch of things to the store. My husband came in and talked for a while, then came out and said: They did not collect things that are more than 5 years old. We had to take home the not picked up items and handle them ourselves. They did not collect off-season clothes either.

I was a bit disappointed! I wanted to sell large items because if I threw them away, I would have to pay a processing fee, and clothes could be thrown away for free, just like regular trash. Anyway, I tried the second store, WonderREX. It's basically the same as Bookoff, but I just brought it all in to see what was so good about this second-hand sale.

When we saw many new and beautiful yet rejected items brought in by some Japanese people, we could only smile at each other. I had quite a few stuff, so the staff made an appointment to check it out for about 1 hour and gave me a number.

I came back one hour later, and just as I thought, they returned almost all of them. At first, I thought they would buy the scale and the humidifier since those two are less than five years old, and maybe some new clothes I bought in Japan that I did not wear or wore very little. But no, they took a shirt that I wore very often, it was nearly 4 years old, but it looked new, along with 3 pairs of shoes of my 2-year-old daughter, including 2 pairs I bought from a Vietnamese market. We got paid 72 yen for all of them.

They still carried all the stuff out to explain what they took and did not take. When they saw that they were giving back too much, they even bent over 90° to apologize. After the explanation, we had to fill out the consent to sell form and present the alien registration card to confirm the information.

Also, there was a big box in front of the store to collect old clothes and bags that the store did not want to buy and customers did not want to take home to throw away. I put all my old clothes in there.

It was truly an experience of a lifetime in another country for me. Next time, I will consider more carefully before deciding to bring my stuff to a second-hand shop to sell at a meager price like this.