A photo making the rounds on social media shows three Disney VHS tapes sitting in a Goodwill display case — The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Sleeping Beauty — each tagged at $99.99. The photo hasn’t been independently verified, but it doesn’t need to be: Goodwill overpricing Disney VHS tapes is a thoroughly documented phenomenon, and the label format, QR codes, and “As-Is” condition notation in the image are all consistent with how Goodwill actually tags items. Real or staged, the story it’s telling is real.
The tapes were donated to charity. Goodwill is asking one hundred dollars apiece for them.
So is this robbery? Sort of. But not for the reason you might think.
The Myth That Started All of This
To understand how a thrift store arrived at $99.99 for a copy of Sleeping Beauty, you have to go back to a viral moment from the early 2010s, when several articles claimed that certain Disney VHS tapes from the so-called “Black Diamond” era — the classic clamshell releases from the late ’80s and ’90s — were worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. The articles pointed to eBay listings as evidence. Nobody pointed to eBay sold prices, which is a completely different thing.
The distinction matters enormously. Anyone can list a VHS tape for $10,000. That doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. The actual market — what people have paid, with money, for these tapes — tells a very different story. An analysis of nearly 2,500 completed eBay sales found that the vast majority of Disney VHS tapes sell for between $1 and $10. The highest sale price in that dataset was $5,000, for an exceptionally rare, factory-sealed copy in pristine condition. Only three sales out of 2,500 cracked $1,000. The average opened copy of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty in typical used condition sells for a few dollars.
The tapes in the Goodwill photo appear to be opened, used copies. The “As-Is” notation on the price tags confirms Goodwill itself isn’t certain of their condition.
What Goodwill Is Actually Doing
Goodwill has quietly developed internal pricing guidance around collectibles, training employees to flag items with perceived resale value and price them accordingly — or route them to ShopGoodwill.com, the chain’s online auction platform. A sheet of internal guidance leaked to r/ThriftGrift — a subreddit dedicated to documenting thrift store price gouging — instructed employees to consider “age and rarity” and “brand legacy” when pricing items.
The problem is that Goodwill employees are not antiques appraisers, and the viral myth about Disney VHS values has thoroughly infected the thrift store ecosystem. As one writer put it bluntly: Goodwill “doesn’t accept VHS cassettes as donations anymore, unless they’re the clamshell Disney movie ones, because they’re the only VHS cassettes people still buy at Goodwill.” And the reason people still buy them is because the myth persists that they’re going to flip them for a profit. Most won’t.
This also isn’t isolated to one store. Goodwill pricing varies wildly by location — some charge under a dollar for any VHS, others have spotted the same misguided collector’s-market logic and priced Disney clamshells at $15, $30, or in this case, $99.99. There’s no central standard.
So Are These Worth $100?
No. The three specific titles in the photo — Hunchback, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty — aren’t even from the “black diamond” era, but rather, Disney’s Masterpiece Collection and are among the most commonly found Disney VHS releases. Disney produced them in enormous quantities throughout the ’90s. Opened, used copies of all three are readily available on eBay right now for between $3 and $15. A sealed, mint-condition Sleeping Beauty from the Masterpiece Collection might fetch $30 to $50 from the right collector. A sealed Snow White in exceptional condition could push higher, but we’re not looking at sealed copies here.
At $99.99 each, Goodwill is pricing these tapes at roughly ten to thirty times their actual market value, based on items that were donated to them for free.
The Broader Problem
The real issue isn’t that Goodwill is uniquely greedy — it’s that a piece of misinformation from fifteen years ago has permanently distorted how these tapes get priced, and Goodwill’s attempt to act like a savvy reseller has made it worse. The chain increasingly positions itself to compete with eBay while still presenting as a charity thrift store, and the combination produces exactly this: a donated copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in a locked glass case with a triple-digit price tag.
If you want these tapes, go to eBay, filter by sold listings, and pay what they actually sell for. Or go to a different Goodwill — the one four miles away might have the same tape for fifty-nine cents.
