Place to sell tons of cheap jewelry (Chicago, Kane: sales, how much)

[MSchemist80]

My mother passed away recently and I am going through her stuff. She has a ton and I mean a ton of jewelry. I am pretty sure most of it is cheap $10 earrings, pins, necklaces and stuff though there may be some more valuable stuff mixed in. Can you recommend where/how I can take it to sell it, maybe a bit at a time as not to overwhelm them.

[Vlajos]

Sorry to hear that your mom passed away. That's always tough.

I really can't help with your question. Maybe a thrift store?

[ChiGuy2.5]

I highly doubt many stores will take in and sell extremely cheap jewelry. Perhaps a thrift store like the other poster mentions or perhaps you should box them up and head to a Craft Show or County Fair. The Kane County Fair comes to mind or seven mile fair up in Wisconsin.

[emathias]

I'd recommend eBay. You can sell at your own pace, and do it all from home. All you really need are some padded envelopes for shipping and a phone with a camera (better cameras can result in better photos which might bring better prices, but even a semi-decent phone camera is good enough for most things). Try to take photos that showcase the items well, don't just snap photos with no thought in them or it will hurt your sales prices. If you want them to sell and don't care that much about how much you get, start them at a penny or a dollar, set shipping to your actual cost (or a dollar more than your actual cost to at least make a little extra), and you should end up selling everything - there are people who will bid low on almost any jewelry so that they can re-sell it themselves or they just like having a bunch of options for jewelry.

Or, if it's really not that valuable, you don't need the money, and you itemize your taxes, you could donate them to a charity thrift store and deduct a reasonable estimate of the retail prices. Chicago has Goodwill, Salvation Army, and the Brown Elephant, which is a charity thrift store whose proceeds go to support health services through the Howard Brown clinic (and I think some other related charities, too). There are probably other ones, too, but those three are probably the biggest ones in Chicago.