It's a for profit business, running off of donations, employing people with disabilities so they can abuse them. Not surprised

Goodwill is built on under paying it's labor. They take advantage of laws that allow them to pay disabled people whatever they want. The laws were meant to help provide labor, get disabled people back into a productive life, and provide some extra income so they weren't completely reliant on Social Security.

That sounds noble right? Well Goodwill has been caught paying people less than a dollar an hour. And as you see here, they aren't giving discounts to the people who have to shop at a thrift store either.

They're walking away with a massive upwards redistribution of wealth from the lower classes to the upper classes. Also I expect someone will be along soon to yell at me, (a disabled person), about the dignity of work and how no one else is providing it. Also in this picture, the meat packing industry which has been caught using mentally disabled people for less than minimum pay in dangerous conditions.

Badwill

Frequent thrift shopper, I've noticed prices going so high I wonder if they know what "thrift store" means anymore.

They are a for-profit company built around taking advantage of poor people.

The “good” will in the name stands for the “blue” in the garment

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

~~Good~~ Corprate Will

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.

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.

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 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.

Support your local thrift stores!

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.