The “good” will in the name stands for the “blue” in the garment
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.
So fun fact. The top story on their success story site is Google IT certification. That’s a 50 dollar a month Coursera course, which will take a dedicated person a single month. You can go to community college for 25 dollars a month and walk into actual IT certification tests. Hell you can take an online bootcamp course for programming and cyber security for 10 percent of the normal cost and pay them only if you get a job in the field.
If giving people a fucking coursera course is the limit of their job training then it’s functionally non-existent.
They hire disabled people because they can legally pay them less then minimum wage. They aren’t the good guys.
How?
people on disability are only allowed to make a very small amount of money per month, usually 1000 or less, or they lose their benefits. I’m guessing that’s why
But they still get minimum wage I assume, just schedule fewer hours.
Yikes, that sounds terrible. And profitable.
Yeah learned about it on Reddit long time ago. It actually legal to pay them so low. Why goodwill hires disabled people.
If they want people to keep shopping there and providing the income necessary to maintain that charitable work, they should probably try to maintain the perception that they price things cheaply enough to make it worth digging through racks of second hand goods.
“Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living”
Very powerful statement, but I somehow doubt they’d be so committed to the spirit of it. Like someone else said, companies are allowed to underpay disabled employees.
The jobs training program where they hire people with disabilities and then pay them below minimum wage because of a loophole in the law?
Goodwill does some good work for the community. A lot of the people they help would’ve been potentially homeless. I don’t know what they pay but somehow I don’t think it is the organization you think it is.
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.
ROCHESTER, MN, MENTIONED RAHHH 🐺🐺🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 WHAT THE FUCK IS BAD HEALTHCARE ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🐺🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸🐺🇺🇸🇺🇸
My wife and I love thrifting in Rochester for that reason, especially with MN’s tax-free clothing.
I loved the wildlife zoo there when I visited Rochester on a whim a few years ago!
Support your local thrift stores!
I used to volunteer with my local thrift store and anytime there was something donated they didn’t think they could sell it would get sent to goodwill lol
My local goodwill turns down anything that’s not perfect because I live in a high cost of living area and they’re getting fed high quality items from across the country.
I do this too. Any junk that might be sellable but likely not goes to Goodwill so they can deal with it. The decent items go to a local thrift shop that actually helps the community.
And habit for humanity
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.
Hi, I’m disabled although I’m still working (at the moment, may break further). I agree with you.
The biggest issue to consider for any company hiring a significantly disabled person, whether mentally, physically, or both, is they’ll be less productive and may require much more oversight, meaning they contribute less to the company. This is the justification behind the lower pay. It makes sense if you’re a shit sack capitalist that values production above anything else.
With that being said, Goodwill is absolutely taking advantage of the disabled. They’re ostensibly a non-profit charity that exists to provide employment, leading to training and work experience, to the disabled community. They pay their disabled employees the lowest amount possible, actively working to justify low pay. Imagine if your employer was constantly looking to drop your salary so you had to constantly fight them over it. Now pretend you have a significant TBI or are developmentally disabled (just imagine your mental capacity while drunk, but without the feeling good) and still having to fight that. Welcome working for Goodwill.
Fuck Goodwill right in their “charity” hole.
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.
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.
I worked in goodwill industries last year. They were paying disabled people subminimum, their regular people $11/hr and Todd Schrieber $200k with a $50k bonus.
They’re also upfront about it: Goodwill exists to give (mainly disabled) people jobs, not to sell things as cheap as possible
Then why does anyone donate shit to Goodwill. I thought they purposely sold things cheap so that people that needed it could afford it.
This is a common misconception with “charity shops” in the UK and “opportunity (op) shops” in Australia.
The assumption is that the charity/opportunity is for people doing it tough to be able to buy cheap clothes and home goods.
But the “charity” is because many shops like this are partner retailers of larger charity organisations, eg: the “profit” from Salvos stores helps indirectly fund Salvation Army Housing and food relief programs.
The opportunity comes from who they hire, if you’re disabled or elderly, these shops are more likely to hire you than other retail providers.
But of course, a large number of charity and op shops abuse their staff as much as Amazon and Walmart do. Wage theft and unethical labour practices galore
That’s been their marketing for decades. It’s been coming unraveled recently though. There are actual thrift shops that charge enough to keep the doors open and do their other projects. There’s also homeless and near homeless donation places that will take your stuff in and use it to furnish a place given to a homeless person.
Really we should have all been very sus of a “thrift store” with Goodwill’s marketing budget.
Don’t make me laugh. They get their product donated, they get their labor at subminimum, and they sell at market price. That’s not a non profit that exists to help the people working there. It’s exploiting them and extracting money from them and the shoppers who are deceived into thinking it’s a thrift store.
Only because they legally pay them less then minimum wage.
Goodwill exists to make rich people richer. The disabled people they “exist to give jobs too” are super exploited.
They are a for-profit company built around taking advantage of poor people.
all companies take advantage of poor people, the poors are terrible at making long term decisions because they don’t have enough capital to afford them.
While true, there are levels, just like dante’s circles of hell. Not all companies entire business models are specifically designed to take advantage of people’s good nature and/or poor people’s desperation…
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.
Who made the jacket?
That’s what I was thinking too. If it’s expensive brand that might explain the high price.
My wife goes regularly to goodwill and those prices are for premium brands and most of the time they still have tags attached or at least look like they’ve never been worn. In her experience they keep that price for a few weeks and if it isn’t sold they discount them deeply
Children
How horrible, children should not be making clothes. They should be picking fruit instead of stealing skilled jobs from adults.
Back to the meat packing plants
Heavens no, prisoners are better for meat packing plants because you don’t have to worry about workman’s comp when they get hurt.
I look forward to Trump’s America, where they can do both without interference from that pesky “government”.
Put the “minor” back in “coal miners”
Make America(n workers) young again.
…and well groomed
Note to self: it’s not funny, okay
We laugh so we don’t end up screaming. 😂 😆 😱
Hănd-made in Usa
*whispers* orphans
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.
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.
No providing products to the working class was very much part of their mission. It obviously isn’t anymore.
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.
They don’t add jobs for shit. Half the staff is there on court order and the rest are underpaid as fuck. Fuck goodwill
That sounds a little harsh for what they do. So these jobs are not competitive or we could even say they are lousy. But the people getting them would otherwise be in jail or otherwise unemployable. Organizations like this are a half step toward normal life for a lot of people coming from a dark place. It’s not a place to make a career.
It’s also based on religious kookiness which I always think is a bad foundation for any organization.
But I’m not going to say “Fuck Goodwill.” I swear there are people on the internet who think literally everything is borderline slavery.
There’s a thousand retail and fast food establishments out there dying for labor right now. There’s no need to use Goodwill as a halfway house. They aren’t teaching skills. They just give them a job and pay them less than minimum wage. If this was a job training program then there would be a point. But there isn’t.
Frequent thrift shopper, I’ve noticed prices going so high I wonder if they know what “thrift store” means anymore.
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.
Also noticed that affluent areas often have donation centers that don’t have attached stores - because they want that fucking treasure for online listings probably.
Fuck the working class if you live in a high cost of living area I guess? But that also explains why my local Goodwill turns away so many donations. They’re getting fed by other places.
The coat is clearly BLACK. The tag says BLUE.
Forgive me if I didn’t detect the sarcasm. But the color is goodwills discount system. On any given day the red tags might be discounted, or the blue. It is a way to clear out stuff more consistently.