ReStore Habitat for Humanity in Monmouth County

Rosemarie Marotta

I'm moving and several days in a row attempted to drop off nice items. Big sign on the door. Not accepting anymore donations.

Rose D

Another great find! Habitat for the Humanities run excellent stores! Both new and used items. Each one has different items by their nature and slightly different focuses based on corporate donors. This one carries doors, paint, windows, tile, bathroom fixtures, in addition to furniture and household goods. Lots of great finds!

Believers Inc

I loved the store until my encounter with 2 of the workers. GeeGee was sweet and helpful however when i arrived to items I desired assistance so I called out for Geegee there’s was another worker who responded “she’s with a customer you have to wait” then proceeded to speak to someone else. Instead of inserting herself to see “how she could help me”. Later I arrived at the register, I desired plates to go with my chinaware set. I inquired about mix and matching. She said sure “do what you want honey” I go to grab 6 plates. I got to the register, to ring the items . The young gentleman btw was very helpful. Then she came over examined the items I picked out and said “oh no” you can have these. These are very expensive. I wouldn’t have cared much however her tone of voice made me leave everything on the register. Yes I had the money however, when you tell a customer to do something, they do it and then prepare to check out and to see that embarrassment was disheartening and unsettling. She could have said ma’am I understand you like this site however I’d have to charge you a little more due to the quality of the item.

N.S.

My first trip to a Restore was this location this week. I won't be back. Truly outrageous prices on items here. A bag of abut 10 small jet plane figures - $50, framed "art" from $100 saw plenty $350 on up, they'll even try and sell you the painting from someone's paint night with friends at the bar - that's the cheapest thing in the store at $5 - palm trees with a smiley face sunshine - really people? A set of used cheap particle Ikea style drawers beat up with scratches and missing handles - starting price $179. Estate sales are really popular in this area too and I saw items at this store that I got at an expensive estate sale for 60% less. It's a great spot for furniture for people who probably normally aren't the type to actually go to a thrift store. There are definitely some clean pretty pieces here. I could understand the price on those. But broken vintage lamps for $150 and up? Yeah, yeah, yeah, almost every single thrift store is for charity. They'd raise a lot more money if they were able to do more volume. The amount of framed "art" there is astounding, it must sit and sit. DVD's are something like $5 and up each. They're $1-$2 at Salvation Army and the bookcase is full looks untouched. I was told that they look everything up before pricing it. It looks like these people don't actually know how to look-up pricing. You have to filter for "sold" and "completed" which tells you not what someone posted it for, but what it finally sold for and about how long it took to sell. When you sell online you have an entire universe of people who can see the item or perhaps get matched with the item they were looking for through search terms. Even with that, people sit on things for years. When you have a pile of stuff in a store that has a limited radius of people coming in = less of a pool of people likely to be interested in that item and less physical space to store it to wait and see. These thrift stores that refer to eBay pricing don't understand e-commerce. If Restore wants to get eBay pricing for everything - go ahead and do what Goodwill does and put it up for auction or sale on your website. In the end I bought a "vintage" cookie jar to gift to a friend who just had a baby. It was marked for $25 I was able to negotiate to $20. I looked it up on eBay. There's about 20 of them already posted - aka saturated market. And in the past 60 days several of them sold online for $10. Meanwhile one of the people cashing me out said "oh this is a collector's item." Not who it was mass produced and there's a plethora of them available at any given time online. You have to love the irony though of items being marked "sells on eBay for X!" - while they have it priced for slightly less than X and it has a discounted sign on it for another 20% off. I wonder why? Anyway, I buy second hand for pretty much everything I need because I'm environmental and because I normally can't afford retail. No need to go back here there's so many other great places to get affordable items from.