My Rare Thrift Store Find
Today has been a very wild ride.
A couple of days ago, my wife and I went to a thrift store in town. We were casually walking around when I spotted something I'd been looking for. A small-body acoustic guitar. To be specific, this was actually a classical guitar. I looked inside the guitar and glanced at the label, "Taurus", then at the price--roughly 11 dollars.
I was ecstatic. I told my wife I was getting it since I'd actually been wanting to get a piccolo guitar that costs around 100 dollars. I had effectively just saved 90 dollars since it's something I was going to get anyway. Plus it was in quite good condition aside from a couple of bumps and scratches.
Flash forward to today. As I left town to come to school for a couple of days, I remembered the brand of the guitar. Taurus. As well as the broken tuning key on the guitar head's left side. I browsed Amazon on the bus, looking for a replica of the keys on the guitar or an actual Taurus tuning key to replace it. I found a replica, but absolutely no references to the guitar brand itself. So I went to Google and Reddit.
I found nothing on Reddit, but on Google itself, I found very strange results. People lauding and praising the Taurus brand. They described in vivid detail its punchy melodic tone and bragged about its origins--the low-end student version of Ramirez classical guitars from Spain. The guitars in their images similar in size and color to my own The low-end student version that sounds just as great as Ramirez itself. As I scraped Google's results, I found to my absolute joy that these Taurus guitars were rare. Extremely rare. They were discontinued in the 1970's. I searched more and found old ebay and reverb (an instrument selling site) auctions where the Taurus guitars sold from between $100 (damaged nearly beyond repair) to a whopping $2,000.
As my professor continued her lecture, I texted my wife a list of close-up pictures I needed her to take of the guitar when she got home from work. I waited hours in glee--I was so excited to post the pictures to some cork-sniffing classical guitar aficionado subreddit or 90's era forum and ask them how much they think I could get for it on online auction.
I figured that barring any serious damage to the soundboard of the guitar, I could get at least $1000 with some high quality pictures, descriptive text, and careful packaging of the guitar prior to shipping.
I've never been this lucky before. $11 becomes $1000 with next to no effort.
My wife got home. She begins sending me pictures of the guitar. So far, aside from the fixable tuning key, the minor scratch & small bump, I see no damage. She sends me a beautiful picture of the rosette. In the background I see the old label on the interior of the guitar through the sound hole. It's out of focus, but I clearly see the word Taurus, just like I remembered. The next picture brings the label itself into focus, and with three words, my heart drops and I chuckle bitterly. Just below the flowing Taurus logo:"Made in China".
It sure was fun to dream though!
Note: this really happened today, for real.
