Goodwill doesn't want broken toasters | Hacker News Reader

Goodwill doesn't want broken toasters

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182 pointsmooreds275 comments

This phenomenon also happens when people think that their physical goods donations (usually mailed/shipped) to distant places after natural disasters = helping.

Often in fact, it's called the 2nd disaster -- the flood of useless, disorganized junk that people send, thinking they're helping but actually adding work to the system. Dirty blankets, old shoes, random toys.

Charities/NGOs really don't want your disorganized stuff. They need $. Money. Funds that they can just spend on buying exactly what they need, in bulk, that can be distributed in an organized way.

Hard to get random people to understand that, or prefer to give money over sentimental junk.

In general they also don't need your sporadic untrained volunteer time either. The volunteering events that HR departments love to organize where employees earning six figures spend hours on make work always strike me as an incredibly inefficient way to actually help people in need.

Charities run these sort of events primarily as fundraising. People who have spent some time volunteering are way more likely to donate and continue donating. It's common that it costs the charity more to supervise the untrained company people than it would to hire for the tasks, but it's still positive when you factor in future funding.

So true. I helped out sorting produce at a food bank for a company organized event. Clearly we were an imposition on the workers there who were far more efficient and then pulled away to spend a half hour training us to do their job poorly for three hours.

Great for coverage in the company newsletter though.

I'd give a call-out to Habitat for Humanity in the US (providing lower-cost homes to qualifying families).

From the builds I've worked, they seem more than happy to exploit your muscle and tell you exactly what needs doing. It helps that home construction is mostly repetitive (nail this way, 100 times).

Also, surprise finding that about 1/4 of IT colleagues don't know how to drive a nail.

Great organization there, and the people donating time do actually work enough hours to amortize the training time. It’s less useful from a corporate publicity standpoint though because of the time investment. Plus your employees are being trained into an opportunity for work that may be more satisfying and still decently paid, and then leave.

I'm probably one of the people who thinks they know how to do it, but in reality don't.

Imho, it's mostly the right weight hammer + accuracy. Sadly, the latter of those lessons was personally learned only through the smashing of many a finger, to the tune of my grandfather's amused laughing.

That's where nailers come in handy. Using a hammer is kind of like coding on an Apple II.

1/4 seems low

There's "I can make this nail go in if I work at it for a while" and "in straight with four hammer blows".

It was generally "I don't understand what 'smack it hard' means."

When you're driving 16d's, no sense beating around the bush.

I'm not the volunteering type, but I went to a work-arranged event where we tutored kids. I ended up feeling mostly guilty after doing it because it would be better for these kids to have ongoing mentoring by the same person than a revolving pool of tech randos.

Sometimes it is just that many randos care at all that matters, and that inspires a person to feel that they matter because you care.

Sometimes you do just need bodies to move dirt or spread mulch or stuff envelopes or whatever. Obviously the phenomena you describe is real, but please don't write off volunteering as a whole.

Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

Sometimes there's value in getting your hands dirty, in connecting with your local community, in having a sense of satisfaction from personally doing a good thing, in seeing how those less fortunate are struggling.

Not every problem is a pure efficiency maximization problem. There are intangibles to consider as well.

> Or you could do your normal work for 100$/hours, then donate that to pay two people at 50$/hours to do it. By spending the same amount of time, you helped twice as much.

This view doesn't take account of the massive range of skills required to deliver actual services (conservation, relief, etc), which would be cripplingly expensive to deliver through paid / contracted staff.

Concrete example: I've been volunteering at a raptor conservancy trust in the UK for two years. The advantages of volunteers is that the Trust gets a pool of enthusiastic people who can be tasked on a wide range of tasks on a very flexible basis. Actual volunteer tasks (I have done about half of these) include

* engagement with the public (crowd control, explaining what is going on, etc)

* animal husbandry (cleaning, water bowls, etc)

* construction (e.g. new aviary builds)

* infrastructure maintenance and repair (aviaries, fences, benches, signage, etc)

* equipment maintenance and repair (lawn mowers, power tools, etc)

* grounds work (gardening, weed control, etc)

* photo-library management / social media editing

* IT support

* conservation surveys (e.g. species surveys / transects)

* nest box deployment

And many more. The volunteers' free time allows the Trust's paid permanent staff to concentrate on their core competencies: looking after birds of prey and supporting global breeding projects and anti-poacher activities. The Trust is often able to match volunteer duties to the individual volunteers who enjoy them most / have a demonstrated aptitude - e.g. a retired guy who enjoys pottering with machines one day a week can maintain a small fleet of lawn mowers, strimmers, ATVs, pressure washers, etc, without the Trust incurring a regular maintenance contract. People with DIY carpentry skills can put up signs, make nest boxes, fix seats, etc.

Volunteer support has also been essential during the pandemic, when the Trust's revenue was slashed as a result of lockdowns.

Your consistent volunteering over multiple years is great and helpful. What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon in matching company shirts after a morning scavenger hunt, play-act volunteering for a few hours, then disappearing to the company-sponsored drinks and dinner event never to be heard from again.

Thank you!

> What doesn’t have anywhere near the same impact for the charity is a group of randos showing up for an afternoon

Yes, I totally agree. It's the long term commitment that makes volunteers useful. Rando newbies need monitoring and don't know how much they don't know about the real problems. So can only be given a narrow range of tasks. They can't be trusted with tools that are dangerous or tasks that have expensive failure modes.

But some percent stick around? I would go going back to habitat for humanity if not for the fact the work sites are all closed due to covid.

> But some percent stick around?

Yes, these are the ones that you start to invest time in.

Coming back to the organisation I volunteer for, the majority of the volunteers are already 'members' (e.g. they have purchased annual season tickets, etc). A few will drop out after a few weeks, typically when they realise that the work can be physically demanding and in all weathers. But once people demonstrate reliability and earn trust, then they usually get the chance to do more interesting things.

My hourly rate is over one thousand dollars an hour, and I still volunteer because it's fulfilling to get your hands dirty.

Sorry that I'm selfish.

If you regularly volunteer for the same task then you are helpful. A one day and never seen again probably wasn't helpful.

I've volunteered one offs before. A local urban farm needed to plant dozens of trees. They spent 15 minutes teaching them turned loose the group. We got them planted in like an hour. Then we moved onto weeding and litter cleanup.

Yes, I volunteer for something that requires a week of training. I volunteer a day every month or so.

Well, at least you recognise that you're doing it for yourself; self-awareness is the first step. Maybe you could donate money too, to make up for it.

The question is then, why do organisations ask for volunteers? They could just appeal for money and pay for people to e.g. rattle tins. Maybe having volunteers signals something to the public, e.g. that the charity is doing good work.

Having been part of an org that asked for volunteers, we did it for two reasons:

First, to try to have a pool of repeat volunteers who we could rely on. In any other context, we would call these people "employees" but we ran on such a shoestring we couldn't pay everyone for all of their labor. Sucks, but such is the nature of the non-profit world outside of the glossy donor magazines. Most of these generous souls were recruited from friends and family or were people who'd received services from us in the past.

Second, is for advertising and to drum up support. People are far more likely to donate to a group they've volunteered with, even once, in the past as they feel a sense of ownership over the organization's outcome. Those "bring a bunch of six-figure salary folks to a group to pack boxes for a few hours?" They tended to result in some of the best donations we received for the whole year.

This is actually a double-edged sword, at least in the USA. You can’t have volunteers and employees do the same work, even at a charity. If you do, you fall afoul of federal wage laws. So you aren’t allowed, for example, to have a mixture of paid and volunteer workers acting as docents at a museum to help with staffing challenges, or have a mix of volunteer and paid workers work the register.

Sorry, I was unclear; I meant we would love to hire all of these amazing people who come back to volunteer week after week, but we can't afford it so we rely on donated labor.

The (very small number of) paid staff jobs and volunteer roles definitely don't overlap. First because our lawyer agrees with you, and second because we feel like that would be extremely rude to have one person be paid while another person is doing the labor for free. If one person is getting paid to do the role, everybody doing that role should be getting paid.

We try to do right by our volunteers. For example, when we have a new paid opening, we tell our volunteers about it first. And sometimes someone donates some money with a note of "do something nice for the volunteers, if you can," so we'll throw a party for our amazing volunteers or buy a nicer lunch (everybody gets fed but sometimes it's boxed sandwiches with chips and other days it's a full taco spread from a local restaurant)..

Free Staff? Is there another term for this that's proper and also doesn't imply compensation?

Is the word you're looking for "volunteer"?

"volunteer staff" is probably close.

"volunteer" by itself is not, because it implies nothing about it being long-term.

Neither one really gets the connotation right.

Repeat volunteer. Long term volunteer.

I'd ask in response if you've ever seen an organization asking for volunteers that isn't also asking for money.

If you can volunteer in addition to sending money, depending on the org they will have some shitwork to do that is unpleasant/monotonous (would cost money to get someone to do) and low-skilled (you probably won't screw it up, and they don't have to waste skilled staff on it - and the skilled staff hate doing it even more than you will.)

most of America isn't making $100/hour. I don't make $100/hour. Heck, 2 years ago, I wasn't even making $50/hour.

I get your point, but for a good bulk of people, their time is in fact worth less than their total individual income for that day.

I'd be willing to bet most people on this site are paid salary, not hourly.

You can still divide your salary by how many hours you work in an average year.

Sure. But I can't choose to work another hour instead of volunteering, make $60, and donate it. Salary doesn't work that way, and which is why these comparisons never make any sense to me.

In fact, if I decide to work another hour, I would be making less per hour.

I’d see those as one day internship to get to know an organization and what they do day to day.

The same way as companies allow kids to come to “do” their parent’s work for one day, it’s more of a PR move + keeping your org in touch with people from different culture/positions.

They do however love the opportunity to grow a sense of loyalty and investment in people earning six figures

Our local minor league baseball team supports fund raisers by having the charity's volunteers work the concession stand for a night for a percentage.

That's how I spent 4 hours making roller dogs one Sat night.

The few regular crew does set up and tear down while the manager has a stressful evening herding cats. =)

I think the volunteer time is not helping either, but there is more to it, through involvement that those people (we) have a understanding of the issues at hand that simply can't be replaced by promotional brochures and other forms of advertisement, which often just seems distant.

Feel good virtue signaling

I’ll add that food banks also prefer money over the can of beans that’s been sitting in your pantry for six months. They can buy in bulk at great rates and they know what the community needs.

100% correct. For example, the Chicago food depository is an amazing organization with a really well run warehouse. It’s best just to give them cash because they can buy in bulk and obviously it’s easier to manage large quantities of identical products than one-off donations.

Food banks also get a lot of bulk food donations from grocery stores and distributors. But they need cash to pay for trucks to pick up the donations, and to rent operating space.

This would be a great scene in a dystopian star warsesque universe.

Planet is bombed, human suffering, etc. Then, because of light speed travel, minutes later broken lamps and broken toasters fall from run down ’good will’ ships that finish off the planet.

See Autofac by PKD.

Short Story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac

TV Show: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6902176/

read the short story as a kid, always stuck w me. more relevant than ever with the continual drive towards efficiency and consumption fueled by amazon et al. the tv ep unfortunately changed the ending in a way that completely lost the character of the original (imo). still interesting but less dickian.

See Charles Stross' Singularity Sky (aka Escaton Book #1).

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81992.Singularity_Sky

https://textarchive.ru/c-2418451-pall.html

In which a materially-post-scarcity society called The Festival liters a world with telephones that all make the same offer.

“Entertain us and we will give you anything you want.”

Reminds me of this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/719719.The_Garbage_Chron...

Where they dump Earth's garbage on another planet, that has life forms based on fruit people. Willy Watermelon Attorney at Law.

More Douglas Adams than Star Wars.

True! Reminds me of the fate of the Poghrils[1] and (to a lesser extent) the Shoe Event Horizon[2].

[1] https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/p/756092

[2] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Shoe_Event_Horizon

Reminds me of the Billy the Galactic Hero. Where one solution for waste management was to ship it off-world. As post-packets...

MCU beat them to it with the trash planet in Thor: Ragnarok.

Which is a strong indication that state or pan-nation but tax-funded aid and reconstruction programmes are better than charity. Yet, we insist in the feel good model of donations for reuse, or only for the tax write-off.

Not that it doesn't have or keep perpetuating problems of its own: obligatory labour laws, and forced market models are strings attached to world bank funding which can ruin an economy faster than you can say "chicago boys"

>Yet, we insist in the feel good model of donations for reuse, or only for the tax write-off.

You do realize that even with the write-off, making a donation is still strictly net negative from a finance point of view[1]? If you donate $1000, your bank account contains $1000 fewer dollars, but you don't get back $1000 in tax credits. It reduces your income by $1000, which roughly translates to a benefit of $1000 * [your marginal tax rate].

[1] assuming you're not pulling any tax shenanigans

> If you donate $1000, your bank account contains $1000 fewer dollars, but you don't get back $1000 in tax credits

That's not how it works in France, you give 1000€ and you get an actual tax credit of 750€ (this is restricted to 20% of income tax).

So if you normally pay, say, 5000€ of tax, now in total you pay 4250€ of tax + 1000€ of donation ; but you can display on your website "donated 1000€ to foundation X !" (which has a value in itself as it improves opinion of your company, you can make a small press release, etc..) And that cost you only 250€ in practice.

You're both lucky.

It's stupid in Canada and seemingly nothing to do with giving or encouraging it. If you're in the highest tax brackets, that last $1000 you earn as income nets you ~$550. If you donate that $550 to a charity, you only get a credit that works out to half your tax rate on $550.

It's less credit for the first $200 in donations, and more credit for amounts above that for unknown reasons. Because 2 people donating $200 shouldn't count as much as 1 person donating $400? Or $200 every year gets you less credit than $400 every other year. Shouldn't we encourage regular giving in small amounts?

Meanwhile, if you have a stock that goes from $100 to $1000 and donate it, not only do you get totally exempt from capital gain tax, you get ~30% back on that full $1000.

If your income is low enough to not pay income tax, you get nothing back on your donations until you do.

Why aren't income-earning people allowed to get a full deduction on the tax paid on their donations?

Only if you ask for it though. You can always just give money and leave the taxes as they are.

In theory the tax write-off makes sense: instead of the government serving as a middleman for charities and making political decisions on who-gets-what, it allows the citizens to more freely support the charities they like directly.

Sadly, in its present form, most people in the US seem to be too exhausted and cash-poor to donate larger amounts more frequently (even before COVID), slowly increasing the reliance on larger endowments based on the whims of fewer and fewer people/organizations. People with lower incomes also probably don’t pay enough in taxes to really reap the benefits of the write-off since it’s only a deduction.

My impression is that poor people donate a lot through their churches, which do tons of important social work, but we HN people have zero contact with those layers of society.

> instead of the government serving as a middleman for charities and making political decisions on who-gets-what, it allows the citizens to more freely support the charities they like directly.

In this case it would make sense to make the donations mandatory and income-dependent. Let people choose which cause to support but don't let them choose not to support anything. I happily pay income tax for the state to support those around me who need it, which ideally should cover the need for donations fully, but see your point.

Still, nobody should be dependent on only the good-will of other luckier people to this extent, when the system and people's background influence economical success this much.

Charitable donations increased 5% from 2018 to 2019 (before COVID). We don't have the data on 2020 yet.

https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g...

It's only a deduction you can take if you itemize your deductions. This rules out nearly all renters.

I apply the same principle to wedding and graduation gifts. Here are people who probably don't even know where they're going to be living in six months. The last thing they need is more stuff.

Not just more stuff: more high-end stuff they'd never buy for themselves.

If only people bought high-end stuff... often enough, they buy low-end stuff, blocking off a product category for a while - e.g., you're not going to buy a proper quality coffee maker for yourself if you just got a shitty one as a gift from a relative, because you'll worry about offending that relative.

I'm not the biggest fan of Amazon, but one thing they do well is gift receipts that let you return the gift for Amazon credit without letting the gift sender know you didn't like their gift.

Asian cultures just give money, well AFAIK.

In Poland money is 100% acceptable too. We had a wedding couple years ago, just said on the invitation that we're saving for the honeymoon, all guests just gave money, no other gifts.

Indeed, especially because you're not supposed to get them stuff that's actually useful, like a decent oscilloscope or a proper set of cone wrenches.

We used a Google spreadsheet for our gift registry ten years ago. One of my friends, a sheet metal worker, gave us a really decent toolbox. Still using it.

Important to keep in mind that the random person in America has more miscellaneous junk than disposable income.

Here's a good old business idea. Create a gift registry where donors upload their donations to be validated / accepted by the charity org. The registry could be open source or for-profit.

This would only work for high value items, or 'semi-fungible' goods with an easy to determine resale value (e.g. books, media, smartphones). For the latter it probably wouldn't work either. You already have things like Eco-ATM and the BookScouter app that let you quickly and easily liquidate an old phone or a stack of books, etc. It's more work than donating (you have to sort through the books, generate an invoice, etc.) but you get some cash. If donating were the same process, many people would probably opt for the cash.

I've known people who made six figures driving around to thrift stores, buying up any books worth >$10 and shipping them straight to an Amazon warehouse. I do believe I've also heard of some Goodwills scanning book donations and sorting out the valuable ones themselves for resale elsewhere.

Someone mentioned "stuff arbitrage" below and I think this is really the value goodwill, et. al provides. Sorting and classifying donations provides a lot of overhead that doesn't scale well for things like clothing. In the past when I was broke and unemployed I used to go to Goodwill and buy a bunch of low-middle end designer clothes (Levis, Ralph Lauren, cashmere sweaters, etc.) for $3-5 a pop, and sell them on ebay for $20-50. The margins aren't bad, but it's a labor intensive endeavor. Between finding the right items, inspecting for defects, cleaning, measuring, photographing, creating an ebay listing, shipping and handling, etc. I made maybe minimum wage. Called it quits after ebay raised their fees for the umpteenth time.

If I'm understanding your idea correctly it would make donating more complicated, meaning less donations. Additionally, if you have things at a thrift store priced at "market value" you eliminate a.) the social benefit of making low cost used items available to the community (think a homeless guy buying a suit for a job interview for $5) b.) the fun of finding that hidden gem, which is the real reason most people shop there to begin with.

For things like art, high-end furniture, musical instruments, it might make sense though.

If someone can solve the huge drop in people who donate if they have to put in any effort it would be amazing.

Facebook has done it essentially already with their donations

Goodwill has a natural time delay that gives a chance for things to die off.

Tainted altruism is a good paper to read. Selfishness (in this case, the desire to get rid of junk) is slippery when it is in the name of altruism. When we have psychological cover, we are more willing to do the wrong thing. Many great papers on this. Look up "tainted altruism" and follow the rabbit hole of papers.

Even giving money to charities may not be a good idea. I think it is sound financial advice never to donate funds/anything to a charity. If you want to donate money, donate to somebody/something that provides a free service/product to you, or perhaps some political organisation whose ideas you espouse, or to a friend in need, but never to a charity.

What do you mean by “sound financial advice“? Of course you are not going to get richer by donating. In fact you are going to be poorer financially! But that is not the only aspect of life which matters.

> “If you want to donate money, donate to somebody/something that provides a free service/product to you”

That sounds very much like paying for the service or product in question. Can you elaborate on what you meant by this?

“... but never to a charity.”

Why? You spent a lot of characters and 3 ornately wrought sentences wich all just reitareted this “wisdom” as if it is a fact without explaining why you think so. Are you against altruism in all forms? Or perhaps you have this opinion from an effective altruism perspective?

I really don't get the appeal many Americans have for charity, and I think there are better ways of helping people than giving to these organizations whose only real effect is going to leave you poorer.

Charity is a non-solution for any of the worlds problems, and a distraction from finding real solutions.

Please elaborate. I’m having a hard time understanding your argument. Are you saying, for instance, that charities should not exist because they are a band-aid for missing government policies? I would submit that the dog rescue charities that I support are not going to be made redundant by a guaranteed minimum income plan for canines…

The early 2000s were kind of a magical time for a young geek because Goodwill was still taking computers, and you could get fully kitted out for a Linux machine for about $50. Over the course of a few trips I picked up a 486, a monitor, keyboard, mouse, an external modem, speakers, a compatible sound-card, and so on. If I'd have been smarter, I could have snagged quite a few old Macs which are now hot commodities.

They seem to focus a lot more on clothes these days, and I can sympathize because people need decent clothes a lot better than I need computers and weird gadgets, but it makes going into the store less interesting. I think part of the problem is that anything actually neat or possibly valuable goes up on their website rather than the store shelves.

Along with Salvation Army, they've increased their prices to the point where it's no longer worth buying from them versus surfing eBay or OfferUp for a good deal on stuff in considerably better shape.

I too remember the late 90s and early 00s fondly at the thrift shop. My childhood stereo systems were exclusively found items at Salvation Army (on Grand River, which had the biggest stereo selection) and my first few modems came from SA. It's something I don't think today's youth have available.

Printed t-shirts at my local Goodwill are more expensive than brand new ones at Wal-Mart a few blocks away. Goodwill seems like it's only a good deal if you're buying whatever higher end stuff they happen to have.

My home theater system has a $20 thrift store stereo coupled with $20 thrift store speakers. It's equipment that would have cost maybe $500 new. I also pickup up monitors, keyboards, mice, cables, and power strips there. Mostly what I get there are books. I like books, and it's a cheap hobby when you get 'em from the thrift store.

From the pawn shop I get laptops and webcams. Also lots of tools. I put together a toolkit for my car this way - cheap tools aren't a theft target.

I dunno, LGR on youtube seems to find a lot of cool retro tech there[1]. A lot of crap too though. Not American, so I can't comment personally.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofB...

He does, but you have to remember that each 15 minute episode is recorded over a period of months (like 4-6 months) of him visiting several stores weekly. So it's not like you'll find anything interesting every time you go.

I'm lucky to live in Japan where we have a junk store called "hard off" that focuses on hardware. They always have some obscure interesting stuff, tons of Laserdisc players, VHD, HD-VHS, Famicom floppy drives, etc. https://www.flickr.com/photos/kalleboo/albums/72157719132609...

Hard off is really good, and there's nothing comparable in the US. You can pretty much get every recent model of cellphone, iPad, Mac, etc. in like-new condition, at a fraction of the price of new. The stuff in this photo album is the "junk" section at the back of the store, and it's still way better than what you'd find at vintage store in the US.

In general, vintage stores in Japan are amazing. I don't know how they manage to find such a huge quantity of like-new stuff.

Wow what a store. My bank account is thankful there's nothing like that near me

a gem: https://flic.kr/p/2kXgdbq

LGR needs to make a Japan trip when possible.

Love the coincidence of laying on my couch watching LGR on a Friday night at the very moment that I find a comment on HN talking about LGR.

I also miss those magical times. Part of the magic was haggling over prices since nobody actually knew if the electronics would work, or simply because you carted off several boxes of stuff they couldn't sell. I managed to explore a number of 8 and 16-bit platforms from the 1980's and early 1990's because of that.

Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken. They knew a lot of people were looking for cheap stuff they could fix, either for personal pleasure or to make a few dollars.

> Thrift stores were also a lot more tolerant of junk back then. If they could sell something, it didn't much matter if it was broken as long as the customer knew it was broken.

I suspect that thet haven’t gotten any less tolerant, just what people are willing to buy from them at a cost that covers justifies the inventory space given competition for the space has changed.

Isn’t it the lack of space/economics that is making them less tolerant of keeping junk around? Or do you mean something else?

There was some concern about liability. One of the shops I frequented in the late 1990's would only let customers who they trusted browse through their sorted junk piles. These piles contained things like bicycles, which had to be thoroughly inspected and properly repaired in order to be safe.

I also noticed a transition towards boutique style stores around that time. While the older stores may sell a box of books or bag of clothes for a few dollars, the newer stores would only sell items at their sticker price (or with a fixed discount during sales). Less product moved since people would only buy something when they felt it was worth the sticker price, rather than paying what they felt something was worth. The transition made space/economics more of a factor than it used to be.

Some of the old style stores still exist, but they are increasingly difficult to find.

Things are a lot harder to fix nowadays.

It was local to the area, of course, but in that time too, but the Boeing Surplus Store was a magical place for me as a young tinkerer.

I probably have a box or two of random interesting looking electronics I bought floating around with the hope to figure out how to make it blink again. Not to mention one of my first PCs being some random office worker's PC that had been upgraded.

I'm still bummed they closed it down.

Boeing Surplus Store felt like.... wandering into Doctor Who's garage. Yeah we came home with some plate titanium, giant sheets of memory foam that got repurposed on our boat, we bought a trailer designed to haul bar steel, then converted it into a canoe trailer for the local boy scout troop, my dad would buy brass bar stock and turn it into POG slammers on his metal lathe that he also got at Boeing Surplus. Just acres and acres of weird cool stuff.

That place was magical. Sheets of titanium, amazing industrial-strength steel scissors for a dollar, military steel desks, all encircled by those amazing paintings of airplane prototypes.

I remember trying to pick up a piece of stainless steel "pipe" there. The piece was about 18" in diameter, maybe 24-36" long. The "pipe walls" were nearly 2" thick.

At the time, I could lift one end of an upright piano in the sense of getting both wheels off the floor.

I had never experienced the sense of utter futility before trying to lift that pipe. The complete and overwhelming sense that I would never be able to make it move even 1mm off the floor.

V = pi r squared times height so figure about 3 times 18 squared times 36 thats about 35K cubic inches if solid, or 2 inch thick walls means subtract 3 times 14 squared times 35 thats about 21K cubic inches. So a good 14K cubic inches of stainless. Engineering rule of thumb to one sig fig (I mean we are assuming pi=3) is stainless is about a quarter of a pound per cu inch, so that pipe weighed about 3500 pounds. A good engineer should be able to do all this in his head; to one sig fig that pipe weighed about as much as a lightweight F-150 pickup truck (not the extended bed super crew cab LOL thats probably 5000 pounds)

World record squat lift was 1036 pounds as I recall. LOL No not my record, my heaviest set on Friday was 480 and 8 reps.

For a year or two Goodwill had an actual computer store full of random stuff. I bought a massive 22 inch CRT there for $50. SCSI drives, cables galore - there were lots of things that you wouldn't find on any other store shelf. eBay was a thing then too, but that store, along with the other thrift stores, was good for a thrifty find. Sometimes there was a profit to be made. Other times it was interesting junk. It was a bit of a low-grade thrill and cheap entertainment for the browser.

The goodwill situation today for niche electronics is actually better than it was back then, thanks to the auction site imo.

the volume/variety may have increased, but the value-finds have gotten much worse.

As a kid I used to frequent the Goodwill Electronics Waste store in Santa Ana, you could kit entire machines together for just a few twenties; the value of the parts compared to their once retail price was maybe 5 or 10 % of the MSRP even back then.

I went back two years ago to satisfy my nostalgia and found the place now filled with 3-4 year old product that hovered around the cost to buy the same parts on an online vendor of some sort, and any of the interestingly-old-but-useless equipment like old ISA video cards/early PCI stuff/AT keyboards/anything beige was marked up so huge by some staffer that mistook vintage for value that it was absolutely impossible to find anything worth buying.

Water damaged gameboy faded-grey cartridge? 200 dollars.

Pentium 3 e-Machine? 300 dollars.

480 line composite security camera with no power supply and no hope that it will ever do anything useful ever again in the future?

Does it have a beige or metal casing? 200 dollars.

I think I ended up finding some cheap molex-style 12v fan to buy for a few bucks (more than any online retailer, still), but it was mostly just a guilt purchase to help support the Goodwill.

I left incredibly disappointed.

There was a golden era around the 2000s where Goodwill was amazing for deals - then someone wised up on values of some items and they just went nuts on pricing, especially anything that looks "high tech" - I suspect overpricing computers and not selling ANY of them is why the Goodwills won't take any computers anymore.

So are the prices adjusting to the market? I'd assume the price would get marked down eventually to the point where they can move stuff to make way for other things that come in. While their cost basis is low, they still have to move inventory to be sustainable.

I just wonder if maybe there are a bunch of people out there willing to pay those prices for some reason.

Goodwill isn't part of a "market", it's a charity. As such prices aren't set rationally but emotionally.

The people giving away their time at the register are doing it to feel good about themselves, to "give back", not because they are interested in or have competence in retail. The product being traded between buyer and seller is smug narcissistic self-satisfaction and moving anything at all is irrelevant.

I've volunteered at a similar outfit as a driver and tried to offer some assistance with realistic valuation for the ikea shit that was wasting 60% of the warehouse, but it wasn't welcomed. $300 for a Billy is "reasonable" and it's for a "good cause".

People working the register at Goodwill generally aren’t volunteers, they are paid employees, though they are often paid less than minimum wage.

My case was probably an extreme example, Salvation Army (in Australia) was a mostly volunteer organization for the brief time I was there.

Problem is the same everywhere regardless of pay structure, charity is used to as a crutch to wave off all criticism, a lack of retail competence, and any willingness to learn.

There’s a big difference between Goodwill and Salvation Army. Salvation Army runs thrift stores to raise money to fund their homeless shelters and disaster relief efforts - thus they are generally staffed by volunteers. Goodwill’s charity is … running Goodwill stores. That’s it. They don’t donate money to anyone. They in fact pay their store employees below minimum wage, under the theory that they are providing “job training”.

They also make a big use of court ordered "volunteers". They might be a non profit but their regional directors are pulling in large salaries off an operation that runs essentially on free inventory and below market labor.

When MacKenzie Scott decided to donate billions of dollars to reputable charities, all of the Goodwills got million dollar donations and SA got nothing.

I’m sorry, what? What is their actual purpose then? How do they remain a charity if profits aren’t being used for charitable causes?

Having grown up in the UK I always assumed goodwill stores were just what we call charity shops over here, you’ll find three or four on most high streets, all run by different charities and staffed by volunteers with any proceeds going to fund the charity’s work.

“Paid less than the minimum wage” has been debunked and was referring to one Goodwill organization, employing extremely disabled people who were close to not being able to work. Cashiers are paid at least minimum wage, usually more.

Not quite. The link below is Goodwill’s official statement on the matter. In fact, as of today, “22 of the 151 local Goodwill organizations” make use of special Federal dispensation to pay at least some of their employees sub-minimum wages. Yes, they go on to say they are transitioning away from the program, but that’s far more than one Goodwill organization - and in the recent past, it was much more prevalent. https://www.goodwill.org/about-the-special-minimum-wage-cert...

Yes it is a charity, but when you walk into the store with money you are participating in a market. You aren't going to pay $10,000 for a broken Pentium computer. Goodwill is still trying to sell stuff and if the inventory doesn't move at all, they will lower prices. If the prices are high, it is because there are enough people willing to pay those prices to justify keeping them at that level.

> the volume/variety may have increased, but the value-finds have gotten much worse.

Yes, awareness of competing buyers (and better market access of the seller) erases arbitrage opportunities. Venues that price at a steal compared to the broader market are not in a stable equilibrium.

Bulk clothes that don't sell get turned into rags.

In my experience, they wind up for sale in street markets all across Africa for extremely low prices. In 35 countries I saw American clothes in HUGE piles for sale.. many still had the goodwill tag (or other donation brands) still attached.

I bought plenty of shorts and t-shirts from these vendors :)

Oh yeah, mitumba, something that has thoroughly wrecked African textile industries - hard to compete with "almost free"

Ironically, "fast fashion" may finally bring an end to this, since this low quality stuff in donated (and thus almost destroyed) form isn't worth being shipped over to Africa, whereas "fresh" FF clothing from Asia is as cheap as mitumba was before.

I'd assume much of that was new, as cloths regularly fail to sell.

I know some of it is preemptively-prepared clothing for things that don’t happen, like commemorating championship wins of teams that end up losing. The stuff for the finalists is ready to sell for the day the winner is decided, the actual winners stuff is sold and the rest is dumped overseas.

> the rest is dumped overseas.

Or worse, shredded outright. In Germany alone, 230 million pieces of clothing (or 10% of the year's offering) are shredded without ever being worn (https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article203216646/Bekleidung-H...).

Based on the condition, at least 99% of it was used, heavily.

One of my favorite used clothing stores is The Garment District in Cambridge, MA. It’s actually an outgrowth of a recycled fiber company that makes janitorial wiping cloths. The good stuff goes to the vintage clothing store upstairs, the somewhat-junky stuff goes to the “dollar-a-pound” floor downstairs, the leftovers get made into rags.

Goodwill (at least mine, there are a lot of them) does take computers, but because of data security they aren’t sold in stores. Most Goodwills sell computers on eBay or shopgoodwill.com after they’ve been wiped.

Is there a Goodwill-type organization that focuses on electronics that I can donate to? These days you need a phone or computer just to apply for a job, let alone function in society.

pretty sure you can go on craigslist and get nearly free stuff if you are in desperate need of a computer or phone.

Let's look at phoenix craigslist.

* Here's a guy who looks like he stole a truck carrying Dell Optiplexes, buried them in his backyard, and has now dug them up to sell for $40 each. He's got 50 of them! https://phoenix.craigslist.org/cph/sys/d/laveen-dell-optiple...

* Here's a Dell Inspiron for $35 ($20 without charger) https://tucson.craigslist.org/sys/d/tucson-dell-inspiron-146...

* Here's a Lenovo xc10 laptop for $95. Not a bad deal. https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-lenov...

* Dell Latitude for $90 https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/sys/d/sun-city-west-dell-...

Bottom line, if you are willing to use an old computer, you can get one for less than the price of dinner for two at Applebee's.

To be honest, I'm more interested in donating to an organization that targets people who need electronics, but don't have them or are underserved by the electronics they do have. Listing stuff on Craigslist or Ebay is going to filter for people or businesses who have the means to check the sites regularly, and the funds ready to purchase things on them.

That's fine if you're local but I hang out on the vintagecomputing subreddit and about once a week you see a horror story of a collector getting something from ebay and it's delivered essentially destroyed.

Oh, I believe that. I once ordered a rare book that was destroyed in shipping. It was terrible.

But with cragslist, you usually pick things up from the seller, as it's local. Ebay is a bit dicier.

This exists locally to me, you might have something similar near you:

https://www.freegeektwincities.org/

They've been great for both buying and selling. They take old cables that don't even work any more and recycle them for scrap.

I see a lot of people give these kinds of things out via online marketplaces either for free or for cheap prices now. In Ontario it seems like the popular sites for this are Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace.

it's more work, but pretty much any old laptop or phone you can sell on eBay. You can donate the proceeds if you wish.

Note that Goodwill is a charity in the same way that IKEA is a nonprofit. They take your stuff for free, and give you a tax receipt, but they don’t give any of it away. They sell it for as much money as they can in their stores. The “charity” part is that they provide jobs and job training … to the people who work there.

Goodwill is simply a way to launder your possessions to feel like you’re doing good, instead of throwing them in a wastebin.

To be more positive, look for organizations like local churches/synagogues/mosques, community centers or homeless organizations that will give your donations directly to people in need. This works well for clothes and home goods, not as well for e-gadgets. For those, you might consider selling them on EBay and donating the proceeds to a charity.

You have made a lot of repeat comments about this and a lot of it isn’t true.

Do they make a profit? If so, where does the money go?

Nonprofits can actually make a profit, they just can’t distribute it to its owners (usually the board of directors) as a dividend. Goodwill pays its executives well, roughly $1MM to many of its regional executives. Its primary charitable work is claimed to be hiring people who are otherwise unemployable, often paying them below minimum wage. Some of this is discussed on the Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_Industries

Not saying your larger point is wrong, but this schtick ("Goodwill pays its executives well, roughly $1MM to many of its regional executives") always annoys me. Goodwill is a large organization, and large organizations require experience and talent to run.

It doesn't matter whether you're talking about a large corporation, a government, an army, a charity, or even a church. It's not going to be possible to find people to manage it properly for $50K a year. Cutting corners when it comes to attracting and retaining qualified management leads to even greater waste in the big picture.

Agree 100%. You are 100% right, and I don’t think their executives are “stealing” money. I am the first to jump in and defend charities, like the Mozilla Foundation, or even Goodwill, who pay their CEO’s appropriately. So perhaps that part of my comment is a red herring. It’s just that Goodwill is extremely odd in that the business IS the charity. Most people don’t put a lot of thought into it, and assume that they are somehow giving all of the junk we drop off on their doorstep to needy people - they aren’t. Or that their thrift stores are earning them money off our junk to fund relief programs and feed the needy - they don’t do that. Their charity is … to pay people (generally not very well) to sort and clean all of our junk, put it on display in stores, and take our money for it when we buy it back. It’s just … weird. It does beg the question of where all the money goes.

it really depends on location. last month I got a brand new usb turntable (that had a goodwill sticker with a barcode, they knew what it was) for $9.

I once accidentally nicked the office fridge when cleaning it and let out all of the Freon. The local recycler refused to take it because they can't accept anything with Freon in it (it didn't matter that the Freon had leaked out). Same with the county dump. On the phone, I asked the guy at the dump what I was supposed to do with it and his official recommendation was to drop it off at Goodwill.

I still feel bad about that.

If your county dump is not accepting household hazardous waste, they're encouraging people to dump their garbage on the side of the road.

Set it on the curb. Somebody with a truck will be along shortly. No need to call. They'll "know"

Fridges are mostly plastic. In the UK the somebody with a truck will cut out the compressor motor (releasing all the gas) and leave the rest of the fridge. Now you have two problems.

That is wild to me. In the U.S hicks will still take the fridge.

Source: my uncle has five goddamn refrigerators in our garage.

How many cars that do not run are in the "back" and how many washer/dryers are in the front yard? Otherwise, I think you are doing a disservice to ther term hick

My coworker tried that. Didn't work, stood there for days.

So he wrote a sign: "Don't touch! Will be picked up tomorrow"

Thing was gone the same night.

Never seen that approach. Instead, I've seen the opposite of adding a sign that says "Free/gratis". Much more positive message to encourage someone to take it.

This is the way. If it looks to be in reasonable condition OR it is mainly made of metal it'll disappear relatively quickly.

Agree. The prices to trash the junk in my aunt's garbage when she passed made it a gross game of 'do you think Goodwill will take it?'

It would have cost thousands had we not sorted most of what ostensibly _was_ garbage into Goodwill acceptable piles.

Life pro tip: don't preserve stuff for your heirs. Odds are they'll take half of it to the dump and the other half to goodwill.

Used to go regularly. Could always tell when someone had died. Huge amounts of matching tacky decorations.

Yes. People who run antique stores usually run side businesses cleaning out deceased peoples houses. They charge a discounted rate to haul all the stuff away, then keep what they can sell in their store, donate most of what’s left for a tax deduction that they keep, and haul the rest to a landfill.

Dumping fines can be thousands of dollars.

But the countryside is more vast than police can monitor.

A lot of cities too.

This is the reason people take their shit to Goodwill. Cities and counties make it too hard to dispose of broken stuff. My locality won't take anything with an electrical cord or a screen, won't take paint, oil, antifreeze, etc.

This just encourages people to dump it all at Goodwill and let them deal with it, or drive out along some country road and dump it in a ravine.

The cost of disposal should be taxed on purchase, and disposal made free.

This is common in much of the EU. When my washing machine broke down¹ it was taken away with the delivery of the new one; the seller is required to offer that (free) option. This is the easiest way, but I can also schedule an appointment with the municipal garbage disposal hotline to come pick it up a few times a year.

The alternative is people dumping their stuff somewhere which will have to be cleaned up anyway, so this is cheaper.

1: I did repair it some years prior (broken cross piece), but this time the electronics failed, and with a toddler getting a working washing machine fast is kind of a priority.

Give the government money now for the promise they'll use it correctly tomorrow and not spend it on something else in the meantime. What could go wrong?

Can I sign you up for "defund the police", or is that the kind of giving money to the government that people are always in favor of?

This could be said about every tax ever

Do you think that accounting doesn't exist?

You've heard of social security, right?

Do you think that accounting is always correct, accurate and not rigged?

Isn't that just sales tax?

Don't know how it works in the US, but in most European countries sales tax/VAT is mostly just a general tax, like income tax.

The problem with a lot of these things are that the costs of disposal aren't counted in the purchase; the company doesn't have to worry about it, the consumer doesn't have to worry about it (until they want to get rid of their fridge or whatnot), and for smaller stuff like Pringles tubes no one seems to pay for it.

This actually applies to most environmental costs.

At some point, someone's got to actually pay for all this. There are a few ways to do this; and an explicit "disposal surcharge" is one way. This could (should!) be higher for hard to dispose products/packages, like packaging that have the the infamous vaporized aluminium applied, and less for easier to dispose packaging. In short, it should reflect the actual costs of disposal and other environmental costs. Just as the costs of raw products, labour, etc. are factored in to a product's price, so should these kind of things.

Aside from the "disposable products" issue, a lot of packaging exists purely for reasons of marketing, to make the product "stand out" more. Makes sense economically right now as no one is paying for those costs, at least not directly. This would change the incentives and what made sense economically beforehand will now make a lot less sense.

I'm not dead-set on a tax as such, maybe there's a better way. The point is that the price of a product should account for all costs of manufacture, not just the costs of the manufacturer pays directly.

Bottle/can deposit-refund systems are the closest thing to this in place today in a handful of states in the US. California also charges an eWaste fee for a tiny subset of electronics. Ultimately this isn't feasible at a larger scale since sales taxes are levied at the state/local level, so there are literally thousands of tax jurisdictions involved which would all have to figure out how much every item ever sold would reasonably cost to dispose.

Those problems are somewhat unique to the US; most other countries just have a national tax.

But yeah, practically it's not necessarily easy. Still, we need to do something IMHO, and this is the best I've been able to come up with thus far which still respects free markets and consumer choices, but also doesn't just shrug off the many very real environmental costs (or leaves it for the government to clean up, maybe). Overall, it seems like a fairly nice balance to me.

Municipal waste disposal usually is funded through property tax.

> drive out along some country road and dump it in a ravine.

I have several acres of forested land. Anytime we clear out underbrush it's chock full of dumped garbage and drink containers. Ugh.

What are you supposed to do with it then? Find an organisation that do accept them I assume?

This is why when you buy a new fridge you get them to take the old one away.

The last time I got rid of something with refrigerant in it, I took it to the local recycler and they paid me for it.

It was a little office/dorm fridge and an old dehumidifier, both of which had a Freon charge attached. The person running the scale rang up the recycle value of the junk so that I got ~$5 instead of paying $30.

Of course at that time they were able to recover and sell the Freon, not sure that's the case anymore.

Many Australian charity shops used mandatory test-and-tag legislation to simply stop accepting them.

Some white goods and furniture do help people eg setting up a house after fleeing domestic violence.

At UK university in the late seventies we qualified for a salvation army refurbished gas stove, to equip our house. Being grant funded students, it kind of made sense. Since we'd bought the house, I still have a fundamental disconnect about this. (The gas company insisted we get a slot meter for the gas for 3 months because we had no credit record. The coal company on the other hand, delivered a quarter ton of coal on spec, for a commitment to pay sometime in the future and sign to a one year delivery schedule. I guess we should have learned how to cook over the anthracite fire)

What charity shops want is people to behave nicely. Dumping crap over the Christmas holidays on their doorstep costs them money carting it away. During natural disasters the problems get much worse, cyclones seem to cause people to aim for a feel good outcome by trading up.

The clothes which don't sell often become "shoddy" which is often felt underlay and removals padding cloth, for one more round of use. Padded envelopes too, they're more paper and shredded plastic these days. Cotton could be paper, if we could separate out the artificial fibre.

I think many people don't know that there is a national level Goodwill organization, and I don't know a lot of detail, but they essentially seem to franchise out the name Goodwill to a bunch of local Goodwill organizations that are all independent of one-another. So, what you've heard about "Goodwill" might not be universal, but something local to one of them.

I worked not that long ago in a Goodwill program that did electronics processing and was finally shut down because it never came close to breaking even. We were refurbishing the best tiny percent of the laptops and such we got and selling them on Ebay; but most of what we got was junk and we had people on an assembly line pulling things apart (chips, RAM, raw metal, etc. etc.) to be sold to recycling operations. We were R2 certified, which is great for the environment, but added enormous bureaucratic and labor overhead. We couldn't just throw out all the batteries and toxic stuff, we had to pay to get it disposed of properly. Finally they shut it down and went to sending everything to Dell Reconnect, which, as far as I can tell, is Dell's way of keeping people from buying used computers.

In any case, it is a shame you can't buy computers there any longer. Back in the late 90s I bought an AT&T 16 bit Unix workstation that I understand was intended to be AT&T's answer to the IBM PC. It was a really cool thing, but way too big an heavy to move across states with, so I eventually gave it -- to Goodwill, I think.

Well that was kind of an amazing story! Thank you for the share.

There are still a few Goodwill organizations that do this- Seattle, Denver and Wisconsin off the top of my head. Most of their sales are on eBay.

Flippers buy from Goodwill and sell items on eBay and Amazon. That is why the prices are so high on jeans and other stuff that might be designer clothing.

Buying electronic stuff is kind of iffy. I bought mice and keyboards and cleaned them up and they worked. Bought a radio with an extension cord and it worked with some cleaning. I have appliance repair books in my basement in case I have to repair things. I could make money buying broken toasters at Goodwill and selling them on eBay after cleaning them up.

I donate cash to Goodwill because they have a program to give disabled people jobs.

Don't they pay them like 40 cents an hour though? It might not be that egregious anymore but those programs are exempt from minimum wage laws and as far as I know goodwill takes that as far as they can.

I used to go to a Goodwill frequently, both as a destination for exercise walks, and for the fun of treasure hunting (especially silver). Four random bits:

* Most expensive trip ever, and maybe why I stopped going... I was skimming the titles of the PS3 games in the display case near checkout, and this worker walks over, just to pointedly cough on me, then walks back to checkout. I was incredulous, rather than angry. It turned what I picked up at Goodwill was the worst cold/flu I've ever had, taking months to blow many lifetimes of snot. What's the opposite of "goodwill".

* Second most expensive trip (better kind), I found a Roomba 400, for maybe $20. So then I had to play with it, and acquire more expensive Roombas to play with. https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/roomba/

* One time, as I was walking into Goodwill, this guy passed me, going the other way. My immediate thoughts were something like, "he wants to get out of here, very expressive eyes, striking hat, and features, he should be in movies". It took additional brain cycles before I registered him as actor John Malkovich.

* I never did find any silver at Goodwill. I've heard that they have staff sort out some things at a central facility, before it's distributed to stores, and that some professional flippers get access to shop at that facility. (On one walk, around then, I did find a set of silver place settings at a yard sale, but the seller didn't know it was silver, so I told them. I said I was walking up the street, to get a coffee, and I'd buy the silver if it was still there when I returned. I suppose it might've been a family heirloom.)

I don't know if they sort everything centrally (I've found items I've donated on the shelf) but they certainly have trained employees at the local stores what to look for - anything on a "high value" list gets sent to the auction site: https://www.shopgoodwill.com

You will rarely if EVER find Lego at Goodwill anymore, and even finding Duplo takes some luck. And if they do have a Lego set it's usually in the glass case and overpriced.

The local government shouldn't charge Goodwill for collecting their trash.

They should pay Goodwill for managing to prevent so much stuff from needing to be trashed in the first place.

Goodwill needs to be careful here. I think what drives a lot of donations is “stuff arbitrage”.

Many people don’t have the time/attention to try to think about what potential value their used goods have. Goodwill has experience figuring out what value can potentially come from what is being donated.

If you make people think too hard about the value of what is being donated, then it may not be worth their effort to donate anything and just throw stuff away.

I'm waiting for the app that will let you take some pictures of stuff, enter a description, have it run some AI to classify the product, look at market rates in your area, and then make an offer. iStuff.

Mercari is pretty close to that. Every time I post it seems to know a good price which usually seems fair to me and actually sells.

I donate to them, and I know what it's worth. But it isn't worth my time to list it on Ebay/Amazon/Craiglist and then spend the time fulfilling the order.

Such things only make fiscal sense at scale, not with a handful of random items.

If I can donate it instead to Goodwill and they list it online and make a few bucks, that's a good outcome as far as I'm concerned.

How do I see Goodwill's current trash bill and pay part of all of it on a donation site?

This is where we need a slider and push notification support

"People gave us a million dollars of trash this year. We could use your support paying for that."

Or to put that in lazyweb construct —

Patreon + Goodwill + #accounting/garbage + Donate.me^

If any of you know a 501c3 org that can handle this and make it happen for them, I'd sure welcome Goodwill and Roden Crater and like five hundred MOMAs on a list of "here's what I can afford to donate right now, let me pick my favorites from a list^^". It would normalize the distribution from the hockey tail it gets right now of Goodwill the Stuff Acceptors.

^ or whatever the typical 501(c)3 white-labels / intermediates are in the donation-routing finance space. But I made up that domain, so I assume it's real. Let's see. Yes! It is! I've never heard of it before. It's totally niche. Thanks, brain.

^^ The real fun part is classifying foundations by their purposes, so that "Making up for human process failures" (which needs a marketing pass) is something I can filter for or just bulk donate to at a site category level and let you batch it.

Goodwill is already a 501(c)3, why not just donate to them directly and let them decide how to best use the funds?

Why not consider a different way, in addition to that?

This is a big problem with charities and other donation driven organizations. People want to say where their donations go, and will often leave gifts for flashy things that can't be used for general purposes. General donations can fill in any gaps and are therefore some of the highest value donations.

No one donates and says, please restrict this donation to the purchase of basic janitorial supplies. But that doesn't change the fact they still need those supplies.

No one sets up a site begging for funding specifically for janitorial supplies, either. It’s fine to choose not to open that door if retaining the control of general pool is preferred. But it leaves human heartstrings untugged and opportunity for “crowdfund energy” donations uncollected. I hope that tradeoff pays off for them!

"Oh, yeah, that dog costume will go within one minute of being on the sales floor," says Steeves.

I can't tell if they're being sarcastic.

I don't think they are; there's a subset of dog owners who just love costumes

In Germany there’s no Goodwill, but often (particularly in some cities or quarters) people will put stuff they don’t need on the street, maybe with a sign “zu verschenken”, meaning “take it for free”.

You can find nice stuff this way, even fully working bikes or TVs, but I have the feeling that sometimes people are abusing of this system and simply using it to get rid of broken stuff no one would pick up!

Not true, in Stuttgart we have an organization called "Das Kaufhaus", same basic principle as goodwill. I shop there and donate things often.

As a side note, if you want to be a hero to your local non-profit, particularly community colleges, then write a check for their general fund. You won't get the cool building, but you'll do an amazing amount of good by paying their operating expenses like utilities. Its amazing how many donors forget about that.

Thank you for linking to the text-only version - it was very pleasant and easy to read.

I’ve rented a truck so tomorrow I’m making two stops, Goodwill for stuff that’s still useful and the dump for stuff that’s not.

I have noticed people do drop some janky stuff off at Goodwill that should really go to the dump.

I used to do the same, but once I learned that the owner/could makes over $2 million a year, I drop my junk their too. He can afford to trash it for me.

Cool. You've just made some low wage worker deal with your trash. The CEO will never ever be impacted by your action, but one or more people in your local community definitely will.

Have a little more respect and empathy for those around you.

This seems like an opportunity for vertical integration. Goodwill can start an unofficial recycling sorting operation, and learn to make a profit center out of this cost center.

This field is also ripe for innovation.

> Goodwill can start an unofficial recycling sorting operation, and learn to make a profit center out of this cost center.

Most recycling centers are running at a deficit because no one wants to buy the recycled material.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBGZtNJAt-M

Seems implausible that they can perpetually run at a deficit. Unless you mean absent subsidies. But if such subsidies exist then that is one way to convert the losses into profits.

In my local area, garbage fees are used to pay for the losses of recycling. That's the usual thing in the US. Same thing for residential waste in landfills.

Thanks for the NPR video. Eye opening.

Hmm. I'm likely guilty of "wishcycling". Though the article and comments below make me not sorry for it.

If I'm donating to Goodwill to create jobs, sorting waste for valuables is a job.

If I'm donating to Goodwill instead of trashing; then at least if there was a surprise niche of eBay buyers for the body of a vintage toaster, there is some possibilty of reuse. Like old clothes; I wouldn't donate a sock with a hole in it -- oh wait, they shred 80% of fabric and sell it was insulation anyway, the hole doesn't matter.

Google “recycling a broken toaster”

Results.

Here are some options.

Call the Store or Retailer. ...

Bring it to Your Local Household Hazardous Waste Collection Facility. ...

Donate to Goodwill. ...

Donate to Local Charity. ...

Contact a Certified Recycler. ...

Honestly it’d be nice for a comprehensive “make it gone” service. Like, the last thing I want to hear is “sorry, we don’t take that” when I’ve decided to part with something. I just want it to be reused if it’s perfectly good, or disposed of if not. If it’s hard to dispose of, charge me accordingly.

If you make it hard for people to get rid of things, they will find an easy way to do it (e.g. those rando tube TVs in the woods)

That exists already (all those "Got Junk" companies).

What's lacking is:

A "guilt free" way to throw something out, believing someone else will find a use for it. (It's an emotional thing basically.)

And a free way to throw stuff out. Like the city that banned throwing away TVs (it costs quite a bit to throw them out). So what do people do? They dump them in front of public parks, then the city gets called to deal with it "it's on public property", and the city pays to dispose of it.

So basically, the city takes care of TV garbage, just like regular garbage, only with extra steps.

I'm a member of my community's local Buy Nothing project[0] on Facebook. I find it a decent way to get rid of stuff I don't want anymore and know that it's going directly to someone who can use it.

The process is pretty clunky because a lot of people will claim an item, agree to pick it up, and just never show, so it wastes everyone's time re-offering it to other people who wanted it until someone shows up. It looks like they're launching an official app[1], so I'm interested to see how that affects things. I'd love to see something like a reputation history so you can avoid dealing with people who habitually waste everyone's time.

[0] https://buynothingproject.org/

[1] https://buynothingproject.org/2021/05/04/buynothing-app-pres...

What I do with larger items is leave them on the curb for a few days - if nobody bothers to stop and take it, then I've been confirmed that it's junk and away to the landfill it goes.

We have a kerbside collection 2 times a year for "large rubbish" removal by the local council. You could mistake it for a street festival at times as you see people walking down the road with what they find of use/value and people in utes or towing trailers picking up an old couch they can use.

then a few days later, they council picks up whats left and disposes of it.

we have a local e-waste facility that also 2 times a year hold a free drop off weekend so households can drop off old batteries/car batteries/lights and such that either are not part of the council pickup or could result in broken glass etc in public spaces.

we initially trialed a giveaway/barter event which had limited success (terrible timing) and the council took what was left for disposal and were happier about it being in a carpark than the usual cleanup of a swapmeet on a grassed field.

1800GOTJUNK and friends are basically this, though you get charged anyhow.

I've used Junk King before when moving and I had way too much stuff to deal with. I filled up an entire truck (furniture, mattress, tons of old computers and other ewaste) and I think it cost me about $400. Considering how much time and effort it would have taken me to properly dispose/recycle all of the stuff, I think it was a fair deal. I can only hope the industry is regulated well enough that they're not just sending it all to the landfill.

They MIGHT take a quick look for some metals but most likely it all goes straight to the landfill.

Technically they're not supposed to take e-waste or other hazardous materials but they're very good at turning a blind eye unless you make it quite obvious that you filled it all with biohazards.

> They MIGHT take a quick look for some metals but most likely it all goes straight to the landfill.

Every time I get a dumpster in my driveway I have strangers show up wanting to dig through it for metal. I wouldn't be surprised if Junk King is careful to sift out anything they can get paid for.

I think a (robotics) startup to process garbage to reclaim as much reusable material as possible while sorting the remainder for recycling and disposal could be a lot of fun.

But your nearest repair cafe loves to see that toaster.

would it make more sense to have goodwill depot at a recycling centre/landfill facility instead?

A family member worked for a number of years at a smaller charity op-shop.

He's got a number of stories about the crap that people donate.

Numerous times he's had to go out and argue with people who are dumping garbage into their 'bin' (it's actually just a donation bin integrated into the wall that is connected to their sorting room.

People will "donate":

- Huge numbers of cheap t-shirts and other clothing that have some company/product branding all over them. Nobody wants crap t-shirts that fall apart in one wash, particularly if they've got some obnoxious branding all over them. Certainly not 20 boxes of t-shirts with "Ask me how to get a lower interest rate on your mortgage!" and a Bank's logo on it.

- Literal bags of garbage.

- Bags of clothing that is/was wet with various fluids. Frequently with a huge amount of mould (because they've been shoved into a garbage bag wet, and then sealed, and left around for a few weeks before being donated).

- Dirty and stained clothing - from light soiling, to very heavy staining, including fecal matter. A whole bunch of clothing from some kind of 'tough mudder' event - still covered in mud.

- As per the article: Broken appliances - not just "not working" but visibly damaged and smashed up items.

When the staff go out to return the items to the person dumping them, there's often an a hostile attitude that boils down to "But this is for poor people, they'll wear/use anything." and frequently followed by "Well what do you expect ME to do with it? I'm donating it to you guys - you deal with it!"

After Marie Kondo's program came out - they had to lock and seal shut the donation bin door for several months, and post signage to tell people to stop dumping their crap. They still got people turning up with carloads of crap that they insisted on trying to dump. The really insistent ones carted stuff into the store, past the signage saying that they weren't taking donations, and insist that someone take their stuff.

One of the worst 'regular' things is when family are cleaning up a deceased estate - they'll take all of the deceased person's clothing, possessions and so forth, bag them up and try and shove it all through the donation slot. Some of the things are worthwhile, but usually poorly packed and broken.

I'd heard plenty about people insisting that certain items were real X - from jewellery to name brand things, and been shocked/offended when the staff point out that "Sorry, no, those beads there are glass, not rubies or sapphires. That gold there is just painted or plated. That bag/coat/etc isn't worth us cleaning, because it's not a real $Brand, it's a knock-off".

Despite all the garbage that came through, they did get a huge amount of really top-notch stuff. Being in a somewhat trendy area, there were regulars (some models and celebs) who would rotate their entire wardrobe every season, whether worn or not.

My answer: don't visit Goodwill at all.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-worst-corporation-in-_b_1...

The Huffpost CEO makes $450,000.

https://www.comparably.com/companies/the-huffington-post/exe...

I'm not sure what your point is? It's not a charity, pays taxes, doesn't receive government funds, and I presume its employees are paid more than the minimum wage/22¢hour.

Does the Huffost CEO pay take advantage of staff with disabilities by paying them less than minimum wage?

I'm not sure about the Goodwill program specifically, but some companies with disability work programs accept extremely disabled individuals who are literally more work to have there than they could possibly accomplish. It is meant as an outreach service, because having a "job" at all is therapeutic for them.

Further, there is a hard cap on income before one loses certain disability benefits, so some disabled people will also be financially better off from being paid less.

I don't see any info in this article about the extent of disability Goodwill was working with, but more often than not these programs are not meant to exploit and really don't provide any material benefit to the company. There is certainly debate about whether the law allowing this is a net positive, but it's usually much more nuanced than a company just trying to get cheap labor out of a disadvantaged person.

The entire point of the company is to do those things you describe as difficult. That doesn't seem to support any notion that the executives should be paid like high-flying CEOs of startup companies.

In fact, the old Grandpa that started it took a nominal salary. When he died, the grandkids all took post in the company and raised their salaries by 10X to 50X.

I can put my money lots of places. This isn't one.

Tu quoque is a fallacy of relevance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

I did not make an argument, hence it is not a fallacy of relevance.

I provided factual information. The reader can draw their own conclusions.

The parent poster provided factual information about a logical fallacy. They did not connect your post to the fallacy, they just gave readers information to draw their own conclusions.

Haha, touché! Well done.

I mean, $500k/yr is about the comp for a senior FAANG engineer gets in SF bay.

I tend not to personally donate to any religious charities, Goodwill and The Salvation Army among them.

There are probably good ones, but there are enough bad ones (like these, some of the biggest) to avoid the whole class.

Give your money to GiveWell instead.

I was about to post this link, saw you already did. Goodwill, like so many 'non profits', are very shady and need a lot of regulatory tightening up.

Broken toasters aren't worth anything.

Curiously, there was a movie where this was a plot device. Shooting Fish (1997)

I find it hard to believe that it costs them $1 million a year in waste costs. The potential to make money and/or tax credits from everything that can be recycled must largely outweigh the residual trash that needs to be dumped. When we threw away a large amount of junk to a junker before moving, I was talking to the worker and they said they not only make money on the junk pickup, but they make money on recycling everything they can from what they pick up, which was over half of the net weight.

If places like Goodwill are having trouble figuring out how to make money off the stuff they can't sell, you should hook up with a junker and split the proceeds as well as save $1M/yr.

I wonder how much is just a matter of semantics. If there's a junker willing to pay you for something, then clearly it doesn't fall into the category of "stuff you can't sell"

Recycling pays squat for most everything - and Goodwill does recycle what they can (clothes into rags, etc).

No recycler is paying for garbage.

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