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I worked at Goodwill sorting donations 20 years ago. This is nothing new. They price according to what they think they can get for it. And if we got in designer stuff that we thought we could make money off of, there was a Goodwill website we sold it on. This is the way it’s always been.
They’re also upfront about it: Goodwill exists to give (mainly disabled) people jobs, not to sell things as cheap as possible
Only because they legally pay them less then minimum wage.
Then why does anyone donate shit to Goodwill. I thought they purposely sold things cheap so that people that needed it could afford it.
That’s been their marketing for decades. It’s been coming unraveled recently though. There are actual thrift shops that charge enough to keep the doors open and do their other projects. There’s also homeless and near homeless donation places that will take your stuff in and use it to furnish a place given to a homeless person.
Really we should have all been very sus of a “thrift store” with Goodwill’s marketing budget.
This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.
The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.
But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.
The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.
But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore
Don’t make me laugh. They get their product donated, they get their labor at subminimum, and they sell at market price. That’s not a non profit that exists to help the people working there. It’s exploiting them and extracting money from them and the shoppers who are deceived into thinking it’s a thrift store.
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I stopped going to goodwill a while ago.
Prices too high.
Also Caught them a few times taking the sale of the week items to the back storage so no one can get the $1 blue tags or whatever color of the week it was.
Also heard the manager yelling at an employee for missing one of the sale items.
I still go to all the other brands of thrift stores, there are like 30 of them in 10 miles, maybe more. And they are ALL cheaper than goodwill.
I also used to go to goodwill outlets and get stuff cheap by weight, but I no longer see hard goods or DVDs there anymore. So I stopped going.
Support your local thrift stores!
I used to volunteer with my local thrift store and anytime there was something donated they didn’t think they could sell it would get sent to goodwill lol
My local goodwill turns down anything that’s not perfect because I live in a high cost of living area and they’re getting fed high quality items from across the country.
Goodwill is built on under paying it’s labor. They take advantage of laws that allow them to pay disabled people whatever they want. The laws were meant to help provide labor, get disabled people back into a productive life, and provide some extra income so they weren’t completely reliant on Social Security.
That sounds noble right? Well Goodwill has been caught paying people less than a dollar an hour. And as you see here, they aren’t giving discounts to the people who have to shop at a thrift store either.
They’re walking away with a massive upwards redistribution of wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes. Also I expect someone will be along soon to yell at me, (a disabled person), about the dignity of work and how no one else is providing it. Also in this picture, the meat packing industry which has been caught using mentally disabled people for less than minimum pay in dangerous conditions.
My mom still goes there but only picks things up when it’s the right “color” if the day, for the 50% off. The fact that she won’t get things that aren’t in sale at a thrift store should be enough evidence to know it’s not really thrifty.
Frequent thrift shopper, I’ve noticed prices going so high I wonder if they know what “thrift store” means anymore.
Almost everything in the Goodwill in Rochester, MN is brand new.
Weird as fuck. And we’re not talking just things like brand new clothes, we’re also talking about things like HDMI cables still in the packaging or clearly unused garden ornaments.
ROCHESTER, MN, MENTIONED RAHHH 🐺🐺🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 WHAT THE FUCK IS BAD HEALTHCARE ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🐺🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸
My wife and I love thrifting in Rochester for that reason, especially with MN’s tax-free clothing.
They are a for-profit company built around taking advantage of poor people.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a price that high at my local Goodwill. Coats only go up to like $16 here.
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What’s really annoying is originally my town had three chains of thrift stores. Savers, St. Vincent’s DePaul and Goodwill. Savers had multiple locations and was generally considered the go-to. St Vinnies was a bit more boutique-y depending on which you went to and Goodwill was always digging through dumpsters.
Savers left town, St Vinnies became much more boutique and expensive and goodwill, while still a dumpster, also became a lot more expensive.
It’s annoying :/
Idk if that’s out of control or not anymore, what’s a dollar worth? But I’ve avoided goodwill for Habitat for a while because there were various stories over the years about shady things. Now, they’re big and basically all franchises so some of this was always gonna happen; lawsuits w/ racist/sexist/otherwise discriminatory managers will eventually happen once a company gets large enough, and franchises have a lot of independent control which leads to a lot of variance, good and bad, at different locations.
But they’re also pretty shit at the corporate level: https://www.cracked.com/article_33357_15-impressively-evil-things-goodwill-has-done.html
So overall, on the astronomically low bar of regular evil corporate behavior, they’re middling, but you should probably donate/shop elsewhere if you want to do the most good.
The coat is clearly BLACK. The tag says BLUE.
I understand the frustration but Goodwill sells all that stuff to support it’s job training and skills program. Here’s the mission statement . Most people see it’s value as a place to donate old stuff or to buy used clothes cheaply but the organization sees it’s purpose differently.
If they want people to keep shopping there and providing the income necessary to maintain that charitable work, they should probably try to maintain the perception that they price things cheaply enough to make it worth digging through racks of second hand goods.
“Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living”
Very powerful statement, but I somehow doubt they’d be so committed to the spirit of it. Like someone else said, companies are allowed to underpay disabled employees.
They hire disabled people because they can legally pay them less then minimum wage. They aren’t the good guys.
How?
So fun fact. The top story on their success story site is Google IT certification. That’s a 50 dollar a month Coursera course, which will take a dedicated person a single month. You can go to community college for 25 dollars a month and walk into actual IT certification tests. Hell you can take an online bootcamp course for programming and cyber security for 10 percent of the normal cost and pay them only if you get a job in the field.
If giving people a fucking coursera course is the limit of their job training then it’s functionally non-existent.
