• Maggoty@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • MiltownClowns@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

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

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    My mom still goes there but only picks things up when it’s the right “color” if the day, for the 50% off. The fact that she won’t get things that aren’t in sale at a thrift store should be enough evidence to know it’s not really thrifty.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • MichaelHawkinSnider@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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.

  • Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Reselling took off in the past few years and everyone thought they could get in on it. Goodwill realized that they were leaving money on the table and started jacking up prices and opened their own online auction site for the better stuff.

    Dumdums who think they want to get into reselling keep buying junk for high prices there and then can’t handle the reselling game.

    • JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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

      • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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        4 days ago

        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.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        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.

  • WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • ShepherdPie@midwest.social
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      4 days ago

      The jobs training program where they hire people with disabilities and then pay them below minimum wage because of a loophole in the law?

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        4 days ago

        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.

    • Electric@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      “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.

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      They hire disabled people because they can legally pay them less then minimum wage. They aren’t the good guys.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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.

  • scarabic@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

    • Makhno@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      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

      • scarabic@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        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.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          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.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      No providing products to the working class was very much part of their mission. It obviously isn’t anymore.

    • bonn2@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      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.

  • Whirling_Ashandarei@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.