What amazes me about all these stories is the ridiculously low prices the thrift store charged. Here in the Seattle area, everything seems to grossly overpriced in thrift stores.
Goodwill in particular moves items between markets and prices them based on the local economy. Gone are the days of 2010 when you could walk into the Bellevue Goodwill and find lightly used designer clothing that some retired Microsoft engineer was tired of. Now everything's priced higher than eBay and there's no reason to stop by.
Everyone else wants to be a "Boutique" and charge high end prices for used goods. Blame Macklemore?
A lot of people that I know and know of shop at goodwill and then resell the items on places like Depop (marked up). I also know of some boutiques that have a similar tactic. It’s worth it to some people to buy marked up items from these places and individuals because going and finding something at goodwill can be a pain and there’s no guarantee you will find anything worthwhile anyway. I think goodwill has caught onto this and has decided to raise prices on some goods.
I suspect that it's largely because Goodwill and Sally Ann became unofficial suppliers for vintage clothing stores. They probably upped their prices in response to that market.
And now Facebook neighborhood free groups are (often unknowingly) supplying such stores; as well as folks simply turning around and relisting on Facebook marketplace.
They've been that for at least 30 years. When I was a kid a friend of mine had a vintage shop in Portland, OR, and they got first crack at what came into a couple of local thrift stores. This was official - vintage shop people would show up at a specific time while the stuff was still in bins and pick through it before it went into the store.
My kid picked up about $1000 in surplus lab equipment from his school. They were never assigned asset tags so figuring out how to dispo them properly was more trouble than it was worth to the professors. He asked and they said to just take it.
I think more than that, the good stuff ends up on shopgoodwill.com, so it's increasingly difficult to find interesting or valuable things in the physical stores.
It makes some amount of sense; there's a bigger market online so they get higher prices and people looking for obscure things are more likely to find them than by visiting stores and hoping to get lucky. It's kind of a shame though that the stores are less fun to visit.
True. Getting great deals at thrift stores is information arbitrage, which is increasingly hard to do in the internet age. Before the internet, it could be a goldmine.
At least in socal stuff at goodwill is still cheap. What's been happening though is the rise of resellers online and physical antique/botique shops (both brick and mortars and at pop up stuff like neighborhood markets) buying everything any good thats set out. If I walk into goodwill at any given point there are 35 people in there, not buying, just roaming and looking like a bunch of jackals around carcasses already picked clean to the bone. They will go through all the racks and look at nothing but the brand on the tags, not the sizes nor the color or anything because its about the resale not their personal use. All the stuff that's left is mostly ugly junk that people keep passing over. I find good stuff occasionally but the hit rate has been so low because of these small business people that I just opt to play their damn game and pay higher prices at the consignment shops where all the decent stuff has been carted off to.
This hasn't been my experience. I recently moved to Colorado and I think they have the best Goodwill's in the country. Not for clothing but all the other stuff, I would never own a $250 coffee maker but I got it at Goodwill for $20.
My best find though is back around 2015, I walked into a Goodwill in Buckhead Atlanta (Atlanta's Beverly Hills) looking for a suit for an interview. Found a matching 5 piece Hugo Boss suit, all in all cost me about $50 but had a retail of I think around $2500. Absolutely insane find, ended up selling it on eBay for a few hundred and getting a brand new suit.
Goodwill is (and was in 2010) fairly shrewd about this stuff. They were running pretty successful auctions on their own site last time I checked. I once got caught up in the bidding for a rare board game there that ended up going for hundreds of dollars.
My Goodwill in San Rafael takes all the good stuff that comes in the back, and it goes to the San Francisco store to put on ebay. The junk stays in the stores. Every once in awhile something of value does not automatically go to their internet store because it was missed by a back room staffer.
A few years ago my Goodwill went through three store managers in a row for stealing over a period of 10 years. One manager was pilfering the jewelry from the safe regularity, and loading up her van after everyone left.
I find it ironic they have cameras everywhere, and signs worning about shoplifting, when it was the employees stealing for years.
You can still get lucky on books, but you need to show up early. The professional resellers are there with their bar code readers at opening. Every once in a while a decent business suit can be found, but those days are kinda gone too. None of the clothing is cleaned before being put out.
Another manager had multiple antique dealers that he was selling to. He was so out in the open about it, the employees didn't batman eye. Good stuff would never leave the back room. He basically had everything sold within hours to his cronies.
There's a good book out their on how Goodwill is run.
It's eye opening. Supposedly the only employees making a real living wage were the Regional managers. 20 years ago they were getting $250,000/yr., and a car.
Don't get me completely wrong, I don't dislike Goodwill. They hire felons for a year.
They are a bit better than most of our 501c3. That's still a low bar though where so many, especially the nonprofits who incorporate in Deleware, are basically formed to reward the founders.
I won't even get started on In Defence for Animals because the founder died a few years ago.
How hard have you tried? Assuming antiquities.co.uk is legitimate, I see a Romana-British bronze brooch offered for sale at $44, circa mid 1st century BC to late 1st century AD. There seem to be many small Roman trinkets you could buy for about the price of a pair of blue jeans.
Having been in a lot of Goodwill stores (including the one in this story, from which I once bought a broken receiver (pro tip: test electronics at the store before buying)) I'm not surprised in the least. Though at least this is one of their more 'upscale' stores, so maybe they get partial credit? I'm going to guess that at least it wasn't on the same shelf with a bunch of old coffee mugs.
