Back in 2005, you needed a standalone GPS device if you wanted a disembodied voice to yell at you when you made a wrong turn. Before smartphones existed, a pocket-size GPS device that was small enough to be convenient for motorcycle and bike use was novel and useful. However, such a device available on the shelf at Walmart in 2017 isn’t so impressive. It’s also not much of a deal. [More]
raiders of the lost walmart
The Most Precious Treasures Of The Raiders Of The Lost Walmart
By 5.8.17 — Updated: 5.9.17
The Raiders of the Lost Walmart is a recurring series here at Consumerist, where the brave explorers who read this site excavate their local discount stores, finding ancient treasures along the way. What we mean is that readers send us pictures of overpriced electronics that are obsolete or even unusable, and that will probably never leave the clearance shelves. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Kmart Unearth Sports Memorabilia No One Wanted 5-10 Years Ago
By 2.27.17 — Updated: 5.10.17
The brave retail archaeologists we call the Raiders of the Lost Walmart recently made a side expedition to Kmart, where they dug up a cache of sports-related gear that has apparently been sitting around, unpurchased for years — more than a decade in one instance. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Unearth $150 Camera From 2006, Ancient Overpriced Hard Drive
By 1.13.17
The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are the brave band of retail archaeologists who comb through the electronics sections of big-box stores to find gadgets that are obsolete or just plain old, and also comically overpriced. In this week’s field reports: an external hard drive and a digital camera that are over a decade old, yet priced as if they’re new. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Find MP3 Player That Users Hated Back In 2012
By 10.10.16
The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are a brave band of explorers who comb the nation’s big box stores for comically outdated, yet still overpriced, merchandise. This is mostly electronics, since they don’t age very well, and today we have two not-so-fine selections from Walmart and from Kmart. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Will Administer Antibiotics To Your Windows Vista PC Now
By 8.2.16
The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are the brave mall explorers who scour the nation’s clearance racks for the most comically overpriced retail antiquities. Here are some of their latest discoveries. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Actually Mark Something Down, Take It Too Far
By 6.21.16
Regular readers are probably familiar with the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, where we feature obsolete yet comically overpriced items available on store shelves. Our readers scour the nation’s clearance sections to find these items, which turn out to mostly be at Walmart because of the retailer’s size, vast inventory, and meager budget for discounts. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Uncover Ancient Memory Stick At Sears
By 5.18.16
A “memory stick” sounds like some kind of fascinating tribal artifact, perhaps a staff that elders hold while telling ancient legends. In electronics, of course, it was a revolutionary flash storage device from the late ’90s that made taking digital photos cheaper and easier, eliminating the need to attach a floppy drive to your digital camera. Unless, of course, you’re Sears. [More]
Walmart Price For 11-Year-Old MobiBLU MP3 Player Falls To A Record Low $55
By 4.25.16
Back in 2005, a Korean company introduced a tiny cube-shaped MP3 player that had more features than the then-dominant iPod Shuffle. The adorable MobiBLU included a voice recorder and an FM tuner, and was a Walmart exclusive item in the United States that came with free Walmart music store downloads. While those songs self-destructed back in 2008, the devices haven’t gone anywhere. You can find them on Walmart’s shelves, often at full price. [More]
Here’s Why The Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Aren’t Really Funny
By 4.20.16
We regularly post discoveries from what we call the Raiders of the Lost Walmart, usually obsolete technology that is still on the shelf at comically high prices. It’s fun to laugh at the ancient digital cameras, defunct multiplayer games, and indestructible classic phones on the shelf, but the electronics clearance shelf can be a hazardous place for people who don’t read fine print. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Find Ancient iPod Case, Rare Full-Price MobiBLU
By 4.18.16
It was almost three years ago that one of the Raiders of the Lost Walmart excavated their first MobiBLU, a mini MP3 player that was the hottest entertainment technology available from Walmart in 2005. Somehow, the devices are still on the shelves at Walmart, sometimes at the original full price, never drawing any interest from paying customers: only from the camera lenses of our brave retail archaeologists. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Will Rock Out With This Zune
By 3.23.16
Across the country, hidden away on clearance shelves and junk bins, there are piles of inexplicably outdated and overpriced electronics that should have no place on a store shelf. Our readers who scour the nation’s big-box stores in search of these retail antiquities are the Raiders of the Lost Walmart. In their latest field report, we see a modestly old PC, an iPod Touch and iPhone case that charges your device from 2011 or earlier from AA batteries, and the hottest media player Microsoft had to offer in 2009. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Find Another MP3 Player Case That No One Will Buy
By 3.7.16
Walmart has almost got this thing with clearing out their old electronics figured out. They found an old item somewhere in the bowels of the store, which was great. They marked it down from $19.88 to $3, which is more reasonable than most of their electronics markdowns. Unfortunately, they may have overestimated the market out there for silicone cases for MP3 players from 2007 or 2008. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Have Just The Thing For Your iPhone 3G
By 3.1.16
Hey, do you remember 2008 and 2009? There was a presidential election, and many people still thought the Blackberry was a fabulous smartphone. The second generation of the iPhone, 3G, debuted at the same time as Apple’s App Store. And sometime between then and 2010, this iPhone speaker hit the shelves of Walmart, where it has stayed ever since. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Find 8-Year-Old GPS For $150
By 2.22.16
It’s not that if you bought this Garmin Nuvi (sorry, Nüvi) 260 standalone GPS, it wouldn’t work. As long as the battery still holds a charge, and the maps are updated, it should work just fine. The problem is that Walmart is trying to charge $150 for an 8-year-old GPS model, and an item that may have been on the shelf for that long. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Discover New Variety Of Ancient MP3 Player
By 2.15.16
In retail archaeology, it’s exciting when an excavation turns up a new type of artifact that has never been studied before. Reader Paris is one of Consumerist’s Raiders of the Lost Walmart, the brave explorers who hunt down retail antiquities in the world’s big-box stores. He found something that we had never seen before: another variety of decade-old MP3 player with a comically high price tag and free downloads from the Walmart Music Store, which shut down in 2008. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Will Put You On Hold On Their Landline Now
By 1.25.16
The Raiders of the Lost Walmart are the brave retail explorers who comb the nation’s big-box stores for retail antiquities: items that have been left behind and forgotten on clearance shelves, out of date and comically overpriced. Today, the Raiders have turned in their field notes on three items: a charger for a long-ago media player, a device to torture people you’re on the phone with, and a trackball mouse that has waited a very long time for a markdown, a buyer, or both. [More]
Raiders Of The Lost Walmart Have No Idea How Much ‘Star Trek: DS9’ Toy Costs
By 1.19.16
Josh was browsing the clearance shelves at his local Walmart in North Carolina, as many treasure-hunters and aspiring retail archaeologists of the Raiders of the Lost Walmart do. That’s when he found something surprising: between some kind of fitness equipment and a Margaritaville-branded margarita machine, there was a toy ship from Star Trek. Not just any toy ship, though: this was from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the ’90s series, and the toy had been hiding somewhere for the last 20 years. [More]
