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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.
The coat is clearly BLACK. The tag says BLUE.
Forgive me if I didn’t detect the sarcasm. But the color is goodwills discount system. On any given day the red tags might be discounted, or the blue. It is a way to clear out stuff more consistently.
Goodwill has started doing regional pricing. They will actually sort high value items out of donations and send them to higher income areas to target middle class “thrifters” who are not as price sensitive. These stores are basically like TJ Maxx in terms of pricing.
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.
Reselling took off in the past few years and everyone thought they could get in on it. Goodwill realized that they were leaving money on the table and started jacking up prices and opened their own online auction site for the better stuff.
Dumdums who think they want to get into reselling keep buying junk for high prices there and then can’t handle the reselling game.
Charging as much as they can get is very consistent with their mission. It’s not their mission to provide a low-cost store where poor people can buy things. It’s to create jobs. The people working at Goodwill are what the entire thing is about. And if they make more money they can add more jobs. It’s not a goal to have low prices.
Charging as much as they can get is very consistent with their mission. It’s not their mission to provide a low-cost store where poor people can buy things. It’s to create jobs. The people working at Goodwill are what the entire thing is about. And if they make more money they can add more jobs. It’s not a goal to have low prices.
They don’t add jobs for shit. Half the staff is there on court order and the rest are underpaid as fuck. Fuck goodwill
GoodCorprate WillI 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
Then why does anyone donate shit to Goodwill. I thought they purposely sold things cheap so that people that needed it could afford it.
Only because they legally pay them less then minimum wage.
Goodwill exists to make rich people richer. The disabled people they “exist to give jobs too” are super exploited.
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.
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.
this is actually A Thing according to my dedicated thrifter wife
They realized they can make more money by pricing what professional resellers would charge, and have starting sloughing off more high end stuff to sell online, and adjusting pricing to be inline with the rest of the 2nd hand fashion reselling market.
They actually sort items and send the stuff which has higher value to stores in wealthier areas.
Yeah, everyone has a phone now, including goodwill employees. They aren’t going to put a Northface coat out for $12.99 when it goes for $129 online used.
Our local thrift stores price according to the real world too, and generally, I bet $35 is still a deal for this coat. Its just not the $3.50 that people want to see.
I went to a Savers (local thrift store chain) about a month ago and they had a boxed Wii console in the glass case. It was used, not sealed, and they wanted $350 for it. I asked the guy if that was a mistake and he told me it was indeed the listed price. “I know for a fact this will never sell at this price because it’s been here for over a year.”
Some of these employees are just putting crazy prices.
Savers is the same as Value Village and it’s a for-profit company that exists in three different countries. They’re not much better than Goodwill, if at all.
100% also happening. I bet they found a boxed Wii online listed for $350 and did not check the “sold” prices.
Then again, “vintage” gaming is having a revival right now, so it’s fully possible it sold for $350 online, but the local customers aren’t the same as the global customers.
I found dollarama products listed for $5+ at the local goodwill. Let’s not just make the blanket assumption that exploited goodwill workers are professional appraisers and that the customer is the problem.
Well, they deal with literally any object any store has ever sold in the history of time or space, likely for minimum wage. So yeah, I expect they don’t get them all right. Having to accurately price 1930’s glokenspiels and 2017 high fashion would be challenging for anyone, anywhere.
Still, it makes sense that they have some processes in place to get it right some of the time, and maybe even most of the time.
I wanna say this has been going on for a while, but it really feels like they’ve cranked it up just recently. I was in a goodwill probably just a month or so ago and it felt like everything there was the same price you’d have gotten it new. It’s insane.
Stick to your local thrifters, people, chances are they have better shit anyway.
My friend frequents goodwill and one time, he came home super excited to show me the Husky mini socket set he bought. He excitedly told me “oh it was only $35!”, assuming he had gotten a great deal… that same socket set was also $35 brand new at Home Depot. It’s almost predatory because people just assume goodwill has better prices. That said… my friend should’ve been smart enough to double check that before buying it, lol
The goodwill near me wants $21 for a pair of jeans that are very obviously used and fairly thin. A thicker pair of jeans is $15.99 at the Walmart 3 miles down the road…
Support your local thrift stores!
And habit for humanity
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
I do this too. Any junk that might be sellable but likely not goes to Goodwill so they can deal with it. The decent items go to a local thrift shop that actually helps the community.
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.
They hire disabled people because they can legally pay them less then minimum wage. They aren’t the good guys.
How?
people on disability are only allowed to make a very small amount of money per month, usually 1000 or less, or they lose their benefits. I’m guessing that’s why
But they still get minimum wage I assume, just schedule fewer hours.
Yikes, that sounds terrible. And profitable.
“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.
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.
The jobs training program where they hire people with disabilities and then pay them below minimum wage because of a loophole in the law?
Goodwill does some good work for the community. A lot of the people they help would’ve been potentially homeless. I don’t know what they pay but somehow I don’t think it is the organization you think it is.
I hate Goodwill out here. They have the least selection of crap, and charge absurdly high prices like this. I go to another local chain of thrift stores called The Hope Chest. There’s like 4 of them around here and they rock. Usually go there for pants because I can find good quality materials and spend like $5 for 6 pairs.
Free market in action.
As in “I gave it to you for free. And you overcharged everyone for it.”
But let’s also be fair, as in “I gave it to them for free out of convenience while getting rid of the stuff that I’d feel bad just throwing away”
I wouldn’t say donating to Goodwill is convenient. It’s more convenient to just throw it away. And reduce/reuse/recycle is a good thing. The bad thing here is Goodwill is blocking the three Rs by marking up the price. Which means they will probably just throw it away eventually because no one will buy it for that. Hopefully they will at least send it to a garment recycler later so that it’s laundered and then shredded to either r make new clothing, or stuffing for pillows or boxing bags.
That’s why I said “that I’d feel bad throwing away”.
The stages for high end go like this: sent to “goodwill boutique” and/or listed online. Sent to cheaper local goodwill with markdown. Added to cheap-item-Sunday (for ones that still do that). Sent to bulk outlet (where people fill a bag and pay one price for entire bag or by the pound). Finally, recyclers
So they don’t block it so much as delay I suppose. But they’ve gotten good at regionalizing their processes
Value Village around here is notorious for selling shit from the dollar store that has printed-on-the-package price tags of $1-2 for $3, it’s ridiculous.
