In the 80’s, a family member was a pick up driver for a local thrift store chain. All the drivers would cherry pick items.
The handle connection to the blade broke on one of my most used kitchen knives (probably shouldn’t have hit it with a hammer). Swung by the thrift store and found an equivalent Chicago-Cutlery knife for $0.57 that is going for $22.59 on Amazon.
I still browse thrift stores, you can get some new small appliances still in their boxes, hawaiian shirts, cool stuff. We are donating more as we get older though, and they are accepted less stuff. Furniture in particular, needs to be high quality.
Kind of OT but related, all the stuff that thrift stores cant sell, or random citizens as well, gets taken to the landfill. I do a truckload of debris from work about once a month. Sometimes I get lucky and pull up next to a thrift truck dumping stuff off. Its not allowed to browse, but you can sneak stuff away.
Its depressing to see how wasteful the US is though. With only a little hyperbole, you could build and furnish a complete (small) home in a week with the materials that are thrown away. Everything is there…everything. Mountains of material.
Did they just snatch them, or did they pay whatever the going rate was? I mean, I’d be ok if the drivers at least paid the going rate for them. After all who cares who actually gets it, as long as the charity gets the money.
But just stealing the good stuff before hand is reprehensible.
I have a friend who used to work in receiving at his local Goodwill. He said that the workers picking things, even to buy, before they got on the shelves (or in the “send to corporate for the website” pile) was forbidden. But he would often call his friends and tell them to get right up there if there was something amazing to be had. Or occasionally he’d plead with his boss to let him put it aside. I’m also sure there’d be a bit of theft going on if the situation presented itself but I think they make it pretty hard to do. Always on the lookout. My friend is a sneaky bastard and I don’t know if he ever managed to steal anything.
But, drivers might be a different deal. Perhaps easier to steal than from within the warehouse.
Pretty much every donate then sell at the store places ask the workers who sort to put aside some high ticket items that might sell better online.
The one I volunteered at did not allow workers to take anything for themselves, but they did have first crack- sometimes- at buying stuff. Or they would just show up at opening.
And still plenty of very valuable stuff got through. Sure, some obvious name brands like Tiffany would be sold online, but those volunteers are by no means art experts.
Watch Antiques Roadshow and you can see that.
I have shopped at thrift stores since I was a university student. These days I only go a couple times a month.
There have always been good deals and the occasional find. There has always been shoddy and overpriced tat too. Two or three years ago some thrift stores started to raise some prices on donated goods to (slightly) shocking levels. I guess this strategy did not work in this economy, as this seems to be done much less often now. Who would pay $130 for a used leather coat not visibly different from the $30 ones?
The “professional shoppers” who can tell the difference in quality and resale value, and know they can easily resell the $130 coat for $200. The high price will deter the ordinary thrift shoppers, and the resellers won’t mind paying it.
But yeah, that’s not as efficient as just selling the better coat online before the ordinary shoppers ever even see it, versus keeping it around till a reseller spots it on the rack.
Putting stuff through a washer and dryer would, I believe, kill bedbugs. I know for certain that freezing or heating to 120 degrees for a while will do the job.
Yes, I buy clothing at thrift stores.
The entire point and goal of thrift stores is to make money for whoever runs the thrift store, which is almost always a charity of some kind. The way to do that is to charge what the market will bear, just like any other business.
That’s why valuable stuff gets skimmed off and sold in online auctions. Why sell an old film camera for $5 or $10 in a store, when you can sell it on eBay for $70, for example? But most stuff is one step above trash, and that’s why it’s sold in the retail stores.
If I had to guess, I’d think someone remembered a bit of their MBA schooling about how if you price stuff higher, people assume it’s better and are willing to pay more, and attempted that with their thrift store items. The thinking being that if someone sees that $130 leather jacket, they’re going to assume there’s a reason that jacket is $130 and that it must be something special worth much more, especially relative to the $30 ones next to it.
Clearly this is somewhat risky, in that a lot of us are going to scoff and move along.
Nope. I grew up lower middle class (or poor when the child support checks weren’t coming in) and shopping at the thrift store was how we bought school clothes. I associate them, perhaps quite unfairly, with poverty and distress.
Mrs. Homie, for her part, loves them. She loves finding a deal, she loves old crap that she can repurpose, and she’s not afraid to wear thrift store clothes if they look good on her (everything looks good on her!).
Only if half trained workers can ID the stuff, which is not always the case.
I assume that places like Goodwill Industries have experts who try to spot the valuable stuff among all of the junk.
Nope. They can not afford them. Sure, if something is spotted, maybe some “expert” might be called in, but the sorters are half trained workers or even volunteers.
If you watch Antiques Roadshow (US) you will see many thift store items that come in very valuable.
They definitely do plus anything iffy can easily be Googled. It’s very seldom that a gem makes its way out. Even 40 years ago there were experts screening out the good stuff but much more got through.
If the thrift stores are smart, they have a sort of triage system. Maybe someone gets a bit more than half trained, and gets some rules-of-thumb for what to sort out, like all cameras, anything that looks like silver, any jewelry, etc…
Then someone with better knowledge actually decides whether it should be sold online or put on the floor with the rest of the stuff.
I mean, I’m something of a camera collector, and I do a lot of looking on Shopgoodwill.com. They definitely do some nonsensical stuff like auctioning lots of cameras starting at $6 and stuff like that. But someone has an idea of what stuff is worth; you never see anything actually valuable in one of those. Valuable cameras are auctioned individually, and usually have a starting amount higher than the lowest one.
To me, that tells me someone’s culling out all the cameras, then someone’s making determinations based on the actual value, and selling the dross in bulk lots.
Sure, but those are by far the exception than the rule, and even there, you’re seeing that 1% of the 1% that actually are worth seeing on TV.
I get that, but don’t think so. Some stuff is just overpriced for no reason. And sometimes Armani suits with real resale value are $20. I understand why high quality stuff for resale merits higher prices, but at the (charity) shops I go to it genuinely seems random. And since the economy stalled, the optimistic pricing has become less frequent. A professionally run small business in a big city has higher prices and perhaps better stuff. I live in a medium city with some affluence and the finds in charity shops are often surprisingly good, surpassing these urban specialists.
Almost all the clothing I wear (or have ever worn) came second hand from Goodwill or St. Vincent De Paul. Sadly the quality items have been skimmed off by the folks who unload the cars and so what is on the shelf is pretty “yard - sale-ish”. If there is one thing that keeps me out of those stores it is the smell of the place. I have never been able to put my finger on what exactly it is, but I will guess is is the residue of roach- killer spray on the furniture.