Holy sheet, that’s a bundle of cash
Op shoppers love a good find at charity stores, but it’s the staff who are discovering there are some items with more to them than meets the eye.
It’s a common occurrence 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 hidden secrets are being found before they hit the shop floor.
Nelson ReStoremanager Rebekah Wyatt said one of the linen volunteers had 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.
The woman detailed what her sheets looked like and asked if anything had been found in them, she said.
‘‘Her husband had been hiding money and not telling her.’’
He had noticed the sheets were gone and had to ‘‘fess up’’ to his wife what he had been doing, she said. 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 goes, they move into a home or pass away, ‘‘you never know what’s hidden in everyday items’’.
‘‘It’s a treasure hunt for customers really, you never know what you’re going to find in a pocket.’’
On the Op Shopping in New Zealand Facebook page, many members shared stories of finding anything from $10 to $50 in pockets and inside books, ‘‘junk jewellery’’ that turned out to be gold, and a $3 Lotto ticket worth $68 in winnings.
Facebook page member Barbara Quigley said people clearing out a deceased or elderly loved one’s things should always check for the hidden stashes carefully, ‘‘especially if there has been dementia issues’’.
Nelson ReStore 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’d rather keep.
‘‘We’ve 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 didn’t 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 had told her husband to take in a bag of clothes she had set aside, to the op shop.
‘‘It was the wrong bag he’d picked up and donated.’’
Instead, he had given a bag of new designer clothes.
Timbs said the wife had called to see if she could get any of the clothes back, but they had all sold. ‘‘He wasn’t in her good books.’’ She also recalled a stash of Bonus Bonds and important documents being found in an old roll top desk’s secret compartment.
‘‘We actually found the owner. The family were quite grateful.’’