territ: I was the mayor of my local Goodwill on Foursquare for a while

Kar98: territ: I was the mayor of my local Goodwill on Foursquare for a while

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Whatever, dude. I make probably an extra $50 to $100 a month reselling stuff I find there. Last month it was a pair of fancy Aigle rubberized-leather horse riding boots that I bought for $6 and sold for $60. And I save 70% on kids shoes and minor toys (army men, sidewalk chalk, crayons, bubbles, etc).

Love love love me some Goodwill. Also the chain of Family Thrift Centers is a total resale wonderland (if you have the time to dig through the shelves).

IAMTHEINTARWEBS: spman: fark the Goodwill, been into one of their stores lately? They want top dollar for items that belong in the trash, and even more for the stuff people might actually want. I see used items in poor condition that Goodwill is charging more for than Target wants for the same item brand new. And yes, Goodwill does cherrypick all the good stuff and auctions it on their website shopgoodwill.com and they also sell on Amazon as well.

So, buy your stuff at Target and quit going to Goodwill. Problem solved.

You don't have to shop any where you don't want to and you don't have to buy anything if you don't like the price. It's called a free market. Welcome to Amurica.
Likewise, once donated to Goodwill, the stuff is theirs to do with as they please. You have no room to complain about it. If selling online makes the most profit for them, that is their prerogative.

It absolutely is their prerogative, but I can certainly biatch about it all I want. If Goodwill's main goal is to make as much money as possible to pad the local CEO's pockets, then by all means. Based on what I've been seeing, Goodwill should probably just get out of the retail business altogether, close down the stores, turn them into donation and sorting facilities only, pick out the good stuff to sell online, and either trash the rest or sell it in bulk.

It's shiat like this which is why I donate to Goodwill instead of the Salvation Army. That and SA being so deep in the closet they're finding Christmas presents.

Johnnyflash: Interesting...I frequent a few GWs in my area, they have a set price on clothes, including suits and jackets, while most other thrift stores can vary. Since you have worked at a GW and have some insight, can you confirm they have monkeys in the back on certain days who get to price some other items? Not being snarky, but I've seen some items priced like this - Great deal, ok deal, then "crap, that's more then new"! So I assume there is an actual monkey with a pricing gun in the back on those days. But other then that, I have a certain one I go to where I can often find $100 plus jeans for $8, and the occasional odd item.

Could be any number of things. Maybe they thought it was worth more than it was, or they were unaware of a certain price drop, but the goal is usually to be about 1/4 of retail. But, if your goodwills are like mine, the price will eventually go down anyway after a certain period of time anyway either by color rotation, or the managers will have to go and mark things down manually.

Also, there's a fair share of stuff that comes in with price tags, and if we have an original price tag we'll price from that (most often this is shoes/clothing, as there are lots of women who buy clothing/shoes that they promptly never wear). But that price might have gone down significantly since it was purchased by the donor. It would be nice if they had a price-checking database or something, but Goodwill is a pretty low-overhead operation.

Flacman: Grables'Daughter: I truly wonder how many items like that - pottery, painting, whatever - are donated to Goodwill and just chucked into the trash compactor as trash.

Basically if its nice looking they will try to sell it- if looks like a kid made it its tossed- This happens a lot. A lot of people have bad opinions on what is art and what is good-including goodwill hardliners who price things on the ideas of what they would pay for something and not what the item should cost. Better for the customers in the long run really.

It also depends on the area you're shopping in. I said before I worked at a good one - that's because it was the goodwill that served the more affluent suburbs around here. In the summer, we typically do over 100 donors a day, and I've had days where we're up to close to 200. That's an incredible amount of stuff, so we were very selective about what we got to put out. And, we could put a higher price on things because our customers knew that there was likely good stuff coming out, and so we attracted some folks who were willing to pay a little more.

As for the rest of it, we do a number of recycling things. Almost all clothing you send to goodwill can be used, if only just to be scrapped into rags. Shoes and books in decent conditions are also shipped off to the less fortunate. Other recycling initiatives (cardboard, wiring, backpacks, purses/bags/belts, scrap metal) may be in place depending on whether the higher ups at your particular goodwill are able/care enough to implement them. Our particular goodwill also shipped off a ton of merchandise to other stores in the chain that don't get as many donations. But yes, a lot of it ends up thrown out.

The one I worked at filled a trash compactor (capacity: ~6 tons, reportedly) at least once a week. But I'd like to stress that ours was abnormally busy both in terms of donations and sales, and that's not representative of what's happening at every Goodwill.

hbk72777: The only asshole is one that doesn't realize that's exactly how it works. All vintage toys are listed on the action site, the only toys in Goodwill are stuffed animals and some newer stuff donated from Target. I've been to hundreds of Goodwills from NY to North Carolina, and they are all run the same way. Where do you think the auction site gets their stuff? And you do realize when you bid, that it's not from some massive factory, it's from whichever Goodwill is selling it? One auction can be from Seattle, another in Texas. So yes, they do cherrypick through it. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but if you think a merchandise fairy comes to Goodwill and gives them vintage items separately and everything the customers donate goes right to the floor, you're a nutbag.

It's not all vintage stuff, but yes there's a big internet initiative now for some chains (some are more behind the times than others). The one in our store wasn't actually selling things online, but it would advertise certain items to people following us on facebook and then hold them until it was advertised to hit the floor. It wouldn't shock me to see Goodwill start auctioning some things, as like I said the internet often is a better marketplace for some of their stuff, but for right now they don't ship anything to customers like they're purchasing something on Ebay. At least that's not my experience.

Flacman: I was probably one of the better employees since I rejected most of the donations that came in largely being peoples waste. All people wanted was that damn donation slip so they could write off their crap for taxes. If they really wanted to do this some would just show up with 1 bag of two items and truck full of furniture and give us the bag for the slip and run to some random dumpsters with the furniture.

/All and all we probably threw away more crap than we ever put out for display in the store because people near the Goodwill donated the worst crap.

I'm not saying that it can't possibly ever happen (the first dibs bit), but there is absolutely a lot of effort put into preventing that. There's really nothing more they can do as a company. Yeah, some people are dicks and will try to bend the rules. That's true anywhere. But to suggest, as the person I was initially responding to did, that it's a widespread thing that is more or less accepted I think is a mischaracterization of the company.

/It's amazing what people will try to pass off as a charitable donation for one of those slips.
//The trash bit amazes some people, but if you've ever been to garage sales, imagine that almost everything that doesn't sell at a garage sale ends up getting donated to Goodwill.

And, we could put a higher price on things because our customers knew that there was likely good stuff coming out, and so we attracted some folks who were willing to pay a little more.

I'm not going to GoodWill to "pay a little more".