OKRB Blog

Before The Donation Run, Ask Us First

August 12, 2026

# Before The Donation Run, Ask Us First

There's a specific box that gets made every August. It's cardboard, it's in the garage or the hallway, and somebody has written MISC on the side of it in marker.

It's going to the donation center on Saturday. And a surprising amount of what's in it is worth real money.

Donating is a good instinct. It's also the last step.

To be clear about where we stand: giving things away is a fine thing to do, and a lot of what ends up in that box genuinely should be donated. Clothes that don't fit. The blender. The lamp.

The problem is that the MISC box is not sorted by value — it's sorted by whether you're done with it. Those are completely different criteria, and the second one has no relationship to what a thing is worth.

So the games end up in there next to the mugs. The controllers end up in there next to a phone charger for a phone nobody owns. And they all leave the house at the same value: zero to you.

What we most often find in the MISC box

Every one of these is something we've had sent to us in a photo of a donation pile:

- Loose cartridges and discs — including the common ones, which still have a market - Controllers and accessories — even third-party ones, even the unloved ones - Handhelds — often with the screen scratched, often still worth a number - Action figures — loose, incomplete, mixed in with genuinely worthless plastic - Cables and power supplies — the least glamorous and most consistently in demand items in the entire hobby, because everybody has the console and nobody has the cord

The pattern is that the valuable things in the box look exactly like the worthless things in the box. That's the whole issue. Nothing about a loose cartridge announces itself.

Why the donation center isn't a filter

It's tempting to assume the store will work it out — that if something's valuable, it'll get priced accordingly and everybody wins.

In practice, a busy donation center is triaging volume. Electronics without cords are hard to test, so they often get processed as untested or not at all. Loose game media gets priced by category, not by title. The thing that had a real number attached to it goes out at the same price as the thing that didn't.

Nobody's doing anything wrong. It's just not a valuation system, and it was never meant to be one.

The thirty-second version

Before the box leaves the house, take one photo of the open box from directly above.

That's it. Don't unpack it, don't look anything up, don't separate the games from the mugs. We can see what's in there.

We'll come back with a real cash number for the parts we'd take, and whatever we don't take goes to donation exactly as planned — you've lost nothing and the box still leaves on Saturday.

And if it's already gone

Then it's gone, and that's fine. But check the garage again. There's almost always a second box.

OK Retro Buys buys video games, consoles and old toys across the Oklahoma City metro. One photo, a real cash number, and we pick up or meet.

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