It didn’t take long for Zach Norris to realize that he had something special when he found a watch worth thousands of dollars in a Goodwill bin full of cheap timepieces with dead batteries.
Norris, whose hobby is thrift shopping, uncovered a 1959 Jaeger-LeCoultre deep sea alarm watch, priced at $6.
Norris, who said he has loved the hobby for years, has always holding onto one thought.
"One day, one day it will happen, and it happened for me," he told KTVK.
He knew the watch was worth good money, but not how much. Still, "I didn't even want to give it to her to scan," he told Azfamily. "I was like, you can scan it in my hand if you want to. I just didn't want to let it go."
Hodinkee.com called it "one of the greatest vintage watch finds of recent years," noting that fewer than 1,000 of the watches were made.
Zach sold the piece to a San Francisco collector for $35,000. That's a profit of almost 6,000 percent.
In a move of good will toward Goodwill, Zach donated some of the money back to the store.
He’ll use part of the cash to make his fiance happy. "We've been planning a wedding for a while, but now that we have the extra funds we're going to go ahead and start taking care of everything," he said. "We're excited."
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