I Bought an 18-Pound Mystery Box of Watches From Goodwill—Here’s What Was Inside

Here’s how the Goodwill auction site works. You place a maximum bid, but the site will only go $1 over the existing top bid. So if my maximum bid was $200 and someone bid $150, it would put me as the leader at $151. However, if your highest bid isn’t enough to beat out your opposition’s maximum, you immediately get an email notification that you’ve been outbid. (In my attempt to buy the 38-pound box, I got hit with 13 emails within two minutes, all of which informed me there was someone else who wanted these watches a lot more than I did.)

At exactly 4:41 p.m., 19 minutes before the auction was set to end, I got an email that I had been outbid. Bastard! So while at an event for my son’s preschool, I covertly unpocketed my phone and started to fight back. I offered $250. Outbid. $275. Outbid. $300. Outbid. $330. Outbid. I put up $360 and waited for my phone to buzz with the email alerting me I was still in second place. But it never came. A few minutes later, the lot was mine for $359 (before taxes and shipping).

According to Burt, watches are one of the biggest sellers on Goodwill’s ecommerce site. Jewelry, the category that includes watches, accounts for 30% of the site’s total sales, and Burt said timepieces are “definitely a healthy percentage of that number.” In 2024, Goodwill sold 133,558 watches on its website. This year, it’s on track to move even more. As of last month, the organization has sold $69,595 timepieces in 2025, including some mega-expensive models. Just a couple of weeks ago, bidders duked it out over an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak that sold for $26,104, which overtook a $25,001 Rolex from 2019 as Goodwill’s biggest watch sale ever.