Without getting into exact numbers what I can do is give a rough estimate of how well we did. That way you can extrapolate approximately what someone would make relative to any given initial investment.

Some of the shops we spent a little time picking their 10 cent boxes. We pulled 50 cent to 2 dollar cards out of there, but we didn't do this for long because it's time consuming. Still, if you figure you pull out even just quarters and you can find a good card a minute, you can make 9 bucks every hour. Not great, but any card worth more than a buck or two stuffed in a ten cent bin drives that up.

Still, most people prefer to pick their own bulk. We stayed away from bulk magic on this trip and mostly (badly) picked pokemon bulk. We don't know enough to do any more than picking out rares, holographics and promos. That was still a worthwhile endeavor as some pokemon rares are worth quite a bit.

Pokemon can be gotten from stores for as cheap as 5 bucks per thousand. The most we spent was 25-30 bucks per thousand. Even then you're nearly doubling up if you can get a full $50 per thousand. Our average was about 15 per thousand and we were paid 45 so we nearly tripled up on the bulk. We still spent time picking, but the rares you pull hopefully cancel out the worthless basic energy cards you have to discard. In our case, we made quite a bit of money on the rares on top of tripling up.

Paying 2 bucks or so per thousand on Magic is possible, and we've done it on previous trips. Worst case scenario it's all pure bulk and you make 3 bucks per thousand flipping it. That sounds miserable, but if you pick up a million cards (and can transport them) it's a decent payday. We don't buy pure bulk, so if you pay 2 bucks per k, expect to pull 20-30 bucks in better-than-bulk out of every k and flip the rest for 5. This takes work, but every time some store owner screws up and sells you 1000 rares for 2 bucks you have a great week. Even when no one messes up, you can more than triple up on magic bulk. Worst case scenario if you don't pay more than you should you should at the very least double up.

On this trip we only had a Jeep so we picked up fewer than 50 thousand pokemon cards. If we do this again and we think there is more pokejunk out there, we can spend more money and prepare to haul more cards. Your transportation costs go up, but bigger collections means more opportunities to find treasure. We think it is worth doing. We all made our money back before the GP started, we got a free trip and we spent 3 days making a profit plus bolstering our binders with new stuff we got at very cheap prices. We still have Magic cards to divvy up between buylists and eBay and we have a ton of bulk to figure out what to do with. It was profitable and we'll do it again. That said, by no means is this approach for everyone.