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.
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.
Frequent thrift shopper, I've noticed prices going so high I wonder if they know what "thrift store" means anymore.
What's really annoying is originally my town had three chains of thrift stores. Savers, St. Vincent's DePaul and Goodwill. Savers had multiple locations and was generally considered the go-to. St Vinnies was a bit more boutique-y depending on which you went to and Goodwill was always digging through dumpsters.
Savers left town, St Vinnies became much more boutique and expensive and goodwill, while still a dumpster, also became a lot more expensive.
It's annoying :/
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 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.
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.
GoodCorprate WillReselling 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.
The CEO of the Goodwill has a private jet.
Badwill
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.
I don't think I've ever actually seen a price that high at my local Goodwill. Coats only go up to like $16 here.
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.
Value Village around here is notorious for selling shit from the dollar store that has printed-on-the-package price tags of $1-2 for $3, it's ridiculous.
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.
Edit: community is pretty dead, I've had other focuses. Anyone want to mod?
Gnarly lint extra. Gonna cost ya!
The “good” will in the name stands for the “blue” in the garment
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.
Oh poor baby
Seriously though you should look at the price of that thing when it was new. Some of those coats go for hundreds of dollars. Goodwill is raising money for the people they support. They also have a lot of overhead costs do to there large size. If you want to see the numbers you can pull up there tax records. No one is forcing you to go to goodwill.
