Home > Video Games > PC > RuneScape > Hanging Out at General Stores
Before the Grand Exchange was released, it used to be fun for me (and probably many others) to hang out at the general stores in RuneScape and check out what was for sale. Because players could sell pretty much any tradable item to the general stores, all manner of items turned up, and it was always interesting, fun, and exciting to observe the store's inventory, often with plenty of coins in hand, in case anything happened to catch your eye. There are many general stores in the game, of course, but it was almost always the Varrock general store that was the busiest, and had the widest selection of items; due to all the players selling stuff to the store, at times it even ran out of open spaces, so if you wanted to sell something that was not already in stock, you ended up having to wait a bit for a spot to become free.
The general stores were also a useful way for some players to get at least some money from stuff lying in their bank that they would otherwise either drop or waste too much time trying to sell; it is better to get 50 coins for 50 shrimps that are no longer needed, for example, than to just drop them altogether. In addition, there were always unstrung bows (usually willow) in the Varrock general store (and I remember the Falador, Lumbridge, and Catherby general stores usually had them, too), generally thousands, or even more than ten thousand at once, from all those fletchers who would rather sell a full inventory with one click than drop 27 bows individually.
I recall once, early on in my RuneScape adventure, I received the loop half of the crystal key from a clue scroll, and in my great ignorance (I thought it was a broken, useless half of a key) I sold it to the Varrock general store for a few coins. Within one or two seconds, somebody bought it. That lucky fellow made over 30K in an instant.
Hanging out at general stores stopped being a popular activity after the release of the Grand Exchange—a damn shame, and another one of the reasons I believe with all my heart that the Grand Exchange was a mistake.