Lion Surplus — Local services in College Township

Are you going to find what you're looking for? Hit or miss. It definitely used to be a lot better.

A couple of things made this place less attractive to me than it used to be. The first is that prices have started creeping up. I kid you not, the first home that I owned was a condo, and I furnished it entirely from this place for around $50. A good sofa was like $20, a good chair maybe $10. Almost every single computer that I've owned was obtained from here. I am a tinkerer, so I have been "Frankensteining" computers for years taking parts of this and that to make a functioning desktop. This was certainly the place for that. Prices aren't what they were and are what I would estimate between double to triple that now depending on what you're looking for.

Since the COVID pandemic, their new hours are unattractive to me. I used to get off from work (night shift) at 6:30am, and I could run right over and see what they had that day. Now they open between 7:30 and 8:00 depending on the day making an odd hour or more that I have to waste when I am tired from work and just want to go home.

Now don't get me wrong, there are still plenty of solid deals to be found but there's no guarantee. I used to go constantly but now I really have to think if I want to wait for them to open and wager that I'll find a good deal, or if I am too tired and just want to go home and sleep.

I’m going to upgrade this to five stars. The people that work there are really, really friendly. That means...

Not worth it for electronic equipment and computers. Their computers and other electronic equipment are very old technology (understandable), yet they price this stuff at or just slightly below current retail value for the new-technology counterparts. For instance, they wanted $10 for a regular old 2 button, wired mouse. You could buy this new for about that price with 4-5 buttons. Another example: $325 for a really old tower PC with an Intel Celeron-D CPU (single core and very low quality CPU) and no hard drive (and therefore no OS), which will cost you well over $200 to purchase to make the PC usable. Basically, unless you have an old HD and an OS you can install, you could be out $525 if you fell for this bunk. Then of course, it's still old technology with no warranty. I don't even know how much or what kind/speed of RAM it had because they would not let me open it up to look. But it doesn't matter, I guess, because you can get a brand new tower PC with hard drive, OS, multi-core CPU and warranty these days for about $400 or less! I only wanted to open up the tower just to see just how bad these people were screwing the public. But $325 for an unusable, old PC was enough to infuriate me. I'm not sure who buys this stuff or why they price "surplus" so high, but it's not worth the time end effort to...

There's always something interesting for sale here, and usually CHEAP! there's always file cabinets, chairs, desks, and classroom things like that. But there's also a computer section which is pretty cool. I think they save the really nice monitors and things for their auctions (check their website, they happen a few times a year) but do be wary. I bought a dell optiplex from them, a core i5 complete with 4 gb of ram and a 500gb drive, for $125 -- thinking, hey, I can slap in my video card from a few years ago and have a killer system!!! Well... Despite having a PCI express slot, its totally blocked by the CPU heatsink (?!) And even worse, the power supply connector (which needs swapped out because its not high powered enough) is a proprietary, mini thing, requiring cable splicing of an adapter if you really wanna go that far. The staff doesnt really know this stuff, but just be wary because all sales are final (that's the crappy part). Rad...