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  1. #1
    Ol' Doogie, Circa 2005 GindyPosts's Avatar
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    Default Goodwill: The Upscale Shopping Store?

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/...artanntp&pfr=1

    Is nothing sacred anymore?

    Any thrift store lover typically cut their teeth in a Goodwill, sifting through racks of donated goods, looking for an overlooked gem to buy or even resell. And as experienced thrifters know, depending on the Goodwill, the goods can be abundant—this writer has been known to score many a designer or vintage find in Goodwills in lesser-known markets.

    But as Business of Fashion reports, the secondhand stalwart has gotten hip to the digital retail game—or should we say the digital resale game. After decades of watching folks clean up on eBay or Etsy with their donated finds, Goodwill has decided to partner with mobile marketplace OfferUP to offload some of their most covetable items to the highest bidder.

    We can’t say we blame them; as BoF reports, the resale industry is currently a $24 billion market. Goodwill’s 3,300 stores alone generated $4.29 billion in sales in 2017, which primarily goes toward maintaining its vast network of stores and workforce (whose jobs are often part of the “goodwill” the nonprofit provides).

    But given the success of sites like the RealReal (which recently filed for IPO), Poshmark and more, Goodwill apparently isn’t leveraging its 117-year-old assets as well as it could, and a long-overdue image overhaul may be the result.

    “We sell all of the same brands as those platforms do, like Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Givenchy, and Gucci,” said Joseph Jarroush, Goodwill’s vice president of retail operations in New York and New Jersey. “We compete with the RealReal every day and have been looking at different avenues to make consumers aware. The partnership with OfferUP will give our listings a national audience.”

    Though Goodwill has long had an identity on eBay, by utilizing OfferUP’s ability to amplify local sales, the app also provides a draw to customers in a given area, a benefit apparently tapped into by Goodwill employees, who inspired this partnership by using the app to promote and move product in their respective stores. According to OfferUp’s vice president of community Natalie Angelillo, most Goodwill items on the app sold within 72 hours.

    Now, 100 of Goodwill’s locations will be working with OfferUp, including in major hubs like New York, San Francisco and Detroit, where associates will focus on marketing luxury or prime vintage goods that come through the stores to OfferUp’s 44 million, primarily millennial, monthly active users. Additionally, Goodwill is implementing inventory control through Upright Labs and using authentication company Entrupy to verify its luxury items. It’s all an effort to elevate one of America’s most established secondhand resellers to a leader in the resale game ... but gee, will we hate having to compete with the rest of the internet for the pennies-on-the-dollar finds we used to score in-store.

    “The RealReal and Poshmark have come out of the gates hot, but we’ve been around for 100 years,” said Jarroush. “Plus, as other companies grab a piece of the pie, the pie only gets bigger for us.”
    I can easily vouch for this based on the fact that the majority of my employment has revolved around Goodwill (particularly, Goodwill of Central Indiana, which later became Goodwill of Central & Southern Indiana, which is important as each Goodwill facility operates differently based upon where you are when it comes to tackling the sales of items) and having worked at both an eCommerce warehouse where we put things on the auction website (yes, Goodwill has its own auction website which the story doesn't go into detail about) for people to bid on and purchase, as well as a retail store where you sent the really nice stuff to the warehouse to put online and then put what else you had on the floor, where it was either bought or eventually sent to an Outlet store, where people could rummage through troughs that rotated by the hour and bought in bulk by the pound.

    As a book scanner (which included CDs, movies, and video games), they used a software program that determined the value of something based on you scanning something or you manually inputting the item, and it told you whether or not it would go to the warehouse, while "wares" (wholesale name for anything that wasn't clothing) was based on the eye of the beholder and depended on the manager's experience and insight on the value before it could go somewhere. When I was at the warehouse, as long as it wasn't something that could kill you (swords, firearms, knives, etc.) or was something that was too "exotic" (some of the items I saw at the warehouse during my time there included Japanese slot machines), anything goes.

    This has allowed for Goodwill to increase its revenue potential as it now allows for it to sell the truly valuable products at a premium, but it also has cheapened its bread and butter since it means that the possibility of going to a store to find a truly worthwhile item is all but unlikely.

  2. #2
    Unadjusted Human on CBR SUPERECWFAN1's Avatar
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    Goodwill has really lost that the last decade really I have tried shopping there. Its like they have had nothing and increased prices on regular items you can't buy. For instance I used to get MLB , NFL , Soccer and Hockey jersey's at Goodwill for $2-3 bucks a piece at one time. Now you can't find them and t-shirts are now marked $3.50-4.00. You can't find any games or movies either as they are either incomplete or behind the counter marked up.
    "The story so far: As usual, Ginger and I are engaged in our quest to find out what the hell is going on and save humanity from my nemesis, some bastard who is presumably responsible." - Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.
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  3. #3
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Goodwill was good about 15 years ago, then they became too big for their britches and marked things up waaaay too much, taking items from any old Joe and just slapping a price on it, hoping it would sell. They increased their bottom line by eliminating Quality Control and raising prices.

    That "vintage" Louis Vuitton Shoe? Heel is worn out. The Givenchy shirt? Moth-eaten. That wonderful vintage Batman puzzle? Full of dog hair and missing half the pieces. All the store is good for, to me, is as a dumping ground for stuff I don't want anymore, but don't wan't to just trash.
    Every day is a gift, not a given right.

  4. #4
    BANNED Joker's Avatar
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    Sounds like you're part of the problem.

  5. #5
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Joker View Post
    Sounds like you're part of the problem.
    Nah, I don't donate bad stuff. But people do and Goodwill obviously doesn't notice. Hence its a good place to dump stuff, not a great place to buy stuff.
    Every day is a gift, not a given right.

  6. #6
    BANNED Joker's Avatar
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    I guess I inferred a quality you didn't imply.

  7. #7
    Latverian ambassador Iron Maiden's Avatar
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    I stopped going to them to donate things. For one thing, every time I've gone to one of them it smells musty inside. Like Scott Taylor, I don't give them anything. Recently I cleaned out my closet and took a bunch of clothes to a local church since they were designated as the place to take donations when a local apartment complex had a bad fire around Christmas time. Ninety people were suddenly put out of their home with the clothes on their back at 2 a.m. Some had no shoes when the firemen banged on their door and told them they had to leave. The next time I have clothes to donate I'm going to take them to a Church resale shop that is linked to a local women's shelter. The shelter's website says they don't take donations anymore or I would take them directly there

    Habitat for Humanity's ReStore will take furniture but they are kind of picky.

  8. #8
    Loony Scott Taylor's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Joker View Post
    I guess I inferred a quality you didn't imply.
    Thats my favorite sentence of the day. Well done, sir!
    Every day is a gift, not a given right.

  9. #9
    Ol' Doogie, Circa 2005 GindyPosts's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Taylor View Post
    Nah, I don't donate bad stuff. But people do and Goodwill obviously doesn't notice. Hence its a good place to dump stuff, not a great place to buy stuff.
    … the other day, we put out a coffee maker that still had coffee grounds in it. A customer pointed that out to me, and I just damn near smacked my face. I don't even work in wares (the catch-all term for stuff that goes on the sales floor) but this is a bit of a problem.

    Again, like I said this past summer; anything of real value goes to the eCommerce building so it goes onto Amazon or an auction website, while anything else winds up on the sales floor. Excluding the truly outlandish materials, such as adult novelty items that we got about 3 weeks ago, we'll apparently take anything as long as it's not a TV or a mattress (that's really our limits at this region).

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