Raiders Of The Lost Kmart Unearth Sports Memorabilia No One Wanted 5-10 Years Ago
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.
Reader Steve was shopping at his local Kmart store in Arizona when he noticed something on a sale rack that isn’t all that unusual for a store in Arizona: The store was selling commemorative t-shirts from a game that the NFL’s Cardinals played. What was unusual was that the game was in October 2006.
“Why would anyone want a 11-year-old shirt celebrating two teams playing each other that both sucked that year?” Steve pondered. That’s a good question. The significant thing about this game is that it was the first regular season game that the Cardinals played in their then-new home, University of Phoenix Stadium.
Reader Joe found something similar in his local Kmart: A rack of U.S. Open t-shirts from the years 2011 through 2015, also marked down to $5, with no explanation.
Our best guess is that both the Cardinals shirt and the collection of U.S. Open shirts were hidden in a corner of the warehouses of their respective stores when Kmart made its decision to purge the warehouses and immediately put all merchandise out on the floor. If they can unload these shirts for $5 each when they were just taking up space for years, maybe it worked out in the end. Who, however, would buy them?
Returning to some more traditional Raiders of the Lost Walmart fare, Steven (not to be confused with Steve) noticed this Zune 120 hanging out on a shelf in the electronics department.
Following the dates on the price tags, it was marked down to only $229 back in 2009, then marked back up to $249 in 2016.
That is cheaper than you can buy the Zune 120 for on Amazon. People are still buying the devices, or at least still posting Amazon reviews for them. Bless you, Zune fans.
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