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If you’ve stayed in a hotel, boutique or chain, you’ll notice that they have flat-screen TVs mounted on the walls. Hotels and motels sold their old-school TVs to the public after they bought new flat-screen TVs. They usually sold for less than $50 (at least they did when I lived in Georgia.)
Every five to ten years, hotels and motels switch out their furnishings. Trends in California king beds, for instance, desks, tables, and chairs, as well as end tables, coffee tables, lamps, dressers, chests of drawers, sofas, draperies, and linens change every few years. Hotels and motels have to stay up on the latest and greatest, or you’ll go to their competitors who have the latest and greatest.
So where can you buy some of these furnishings? Well, clearance companies, liquidators, and second-hand stores buy up many of them. Some hotels and motels will run huge ads in the Sunday papers. They buy ads on TV and the radio, letting everyone know there are bargains to be had. Let’s examine some of the places you can buy cool hotel furniture for your home.
eBay
eBay and Amazon are the first two places I look for things I need. I don’t own a car, so it’s a little difficult for me to haul a table and chairs home. That’s why I don’t mind putting something together when it arrives from eBay in a box. The point is that many of us go online to buy something before we drive to a store.
Liquidators and other retail stores all have eBay pages. Their brick-and-mortar stores are only part of their picture. Look up Hotel Furniture on eBay, and you’ll see everything listed above and then some. There are dozens of pages of hotel furniture, so scroll until you find a reasonable price with free shipping, and you’ll be good to go.
Online is where it’s at and has been since the Internet was invented. Liquidators and clearance companies as well as second-hand stores all have Facebook pages. When you come across a liquidator’s FB page, it will lead you to its website. There, you can shop to your heart’s content, and the furniture will be shipped right to your door.
Liquidators
They’re called Ollie’s and Big Lots in Georgia, Tennessee, and Maryland. They’re called different names in your city and state. They’re massive stores selling everything a department store, pharmacy, flooring, bedding, art gallery, and any store in between would sell.
You’ll find in these liquidator stores rugs from hotel rooms, the paintings on the walls, the alarm radio on the bedside table, the lamps, the wall sconces, and anything else moveable in a hotel room. Liquidators don’t have a huge markup, because they buy in bulk. That makes each individual piece cheaper.
A lot of people won’t buy from liquidators because they think the merchandise isn’t as good quality as it would be at a “real” furniture store. Oh, contraire. If you’ll sit on it in a hotel room, it’s “real” enough, yes?
Clearance Companies
Some folks call them outlet stores, while others call them surplus stores. In Maryland, lots of stores are called “(fill in the blank)” for Less. Dress4Less, Cars For Less, and you get the idea. Some of these “for less” stores sell hotel furniture. Whatever you call them, they’re the same as liquidators. They buy merchandise, warehouse it, and then retail it in their stores. Good quality furniture “for less.”
Second-Hand Stores
Some thrift and second-hand stores are lucky enough to operate from a huge base. They buy from estate sales and liquidations. They also buy from hotels selling their wares. If they have room for it on their sales floor, then bye-bye, hotel. So if you’re in the market for some nice hotel furniture or linens, then check out your local second-hand stores. They usually know each other, so ask among them for the store that features hotel furnishings.
Print Media And Radio
Most cities have neighborhood Penny Saver-type magazines that come out each week. They almost exclusively contain ads for everything from cars to bikes to hods of brick to furniture to dating to Girl Scout cookies. Some hotels buy ads in these neighborhood magazines to alert buyers to bargains.
Then there’s the main newspaper in which hotels often buy full-page ads to advertise their sales. The ads will run for several weeks before the sale begins, so you’ll have time to notice the ad and prepare for your buying spree. Some hotels even run ads thanking people for buying their furnishings, TVs, and linens.
What else can you do in gridlocked traffic, on a long drive across states, or on a vacation but listen to the radio? Okay, the kids in the back seat have their iPods plugged into their ears, but you can’t do that. So you turn on the switch and the first thing you hear is an ad for a hotel that’s selling off its furnishings. Hmm, you could use a new queen bed or a nice sofa.
Catch it on the way back home, and you’ll be set.
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Please note that some of the imagery in this article were created with the aid of AI image generators.