Mildly Infuriating

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.

The coat is clearly BLACK. The tag says BLUE.

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.

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.

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.

~~Good~~ Corprate Will

Thank you for purchasing all these donated goods that we paid nothing to buy. Your purchase makes our job programme possible.

Do you want to round up to the nearest dollar on your purchase of donated goods, in order to donate to our job programme that you've already donated to?

... um... ... No?...

Edit: jokes aside, goodwill does do good for the community. I'm sure they've raised their prices in line with other price hikes, but I don't think that negates the good they still do. $35 US for a used coat they received as a free donation, IMO, is a bit excessive, but I can't blame them for trying to squeeze more out of their stock, since they do turn around and pour most of that back into the community.

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.