Holy sheet that’s a lot of cash
Op shoppers love a good find at charity stores but it is the staff who are discovering there are some items with more to them than meets the eye.
It is common for bags of donations and pieces of furniture to hold long forgotten treasures, and while some fossickers are lucky enough to find these when they get their purchases home, many are found before the item hits the shop floor.
Nelson ReStore manager Rebekah Wyatt said one of the linen volunteers looked ‘‘as white as a sheet’’ when she told Wyatt there was something she needed to see. Among a donation of sheets was a money bag containing close to $4000 in cash. Wyatt said the money was taken to the police where it remained for a few weeks until a woman called ReStore.
She detailed what her sheets looked like and asked if anything had been found in them, Wyatt said. ‘‘Her husband had been hiding money and not telling her.’’
Fortunately the husband and his money were reunited.
‘‘We get that quite a lot, surprisingly, though not that much [money].’’
Wyatt said if people were hiding things then their memory faded, they moved into a home or passed away, ‘‘you never know what is hidden in everyday items’’.
’’It is a treasure hunt ... you never know what you are going to find in a pocket.’’
ReStore Nelson received two or three calls a week, Wyatt said, from people hoping to get items back they had inadvertently donated – and sometimes it was children who discovered their parents were donating things they would rather keep.
‘‘We have had children come in and find their toys parents have donated and not told them.
’’There was a kid who said: That’s my rocking horse, grandpa made that.’’ She said the parent told the child they did not play on it any more but the child sat on it and refused to leave.
One husband suffered from a case of mistaken bag identity.
Hospice Shop Nelson manager Dianne Timbs said a woman out of town for work told her husband to take in a bag of clothes she had set aside, to the op shop. But he picked up a bag of new designer clothes. Timbs said the wife called to see if she could get any of the clothes back but they had all sold. ‘‘He was not in her good books.’’
Timbs also recalled a stash of Bonus Bonds and important documents found in an old desk’s secret compartment. ‘‘We actually found the owner. The family were quite grateful.’’