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What you should know about thrift stores

What you should know about thrift stores

Last updated on: October 22, 2016 at 3:09 pm by Jane the Actuary

What you should know about thrift stores 2016-10-22T15:09:44-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Longtime readers will know that, while I’m not overweight in the conventional sense, I still struggle with shedding the weight I gained once the trifecta of starting telecommuting, having my youngest start school (and no longer being as active with him), and reaching 40. (Whether the post-40 weight gain is real or mythical is an exercise left to the reader.) And as a consequence, I haven’t bought a pair of jeans or slacks new in quite a while, but hunt for reasonably-in-style clothes at the local thrift stores. Combine that with years of buying thrifted maternity clothes, and pre-maternity (bloated/gained weight but not yet maternity clothes-ready), and post-maternity (weight loss in progress) clothes, and I fancy myself a bit of an expert at thrift stores.

So, having read an article yesterday in the Huffington Post about Goodwill’s process for, well, processing donated items (which you should read – it’s very informative), and seeing a lot of misunderstanding and accusations in that article’s comments, I thought it would be a good time to dig into my knowledge and share it with you.

First, understand that there are different types of resale/second stores:

There are local thrift stores, benefiting local charities, staffed by volunteers, often older ladies or teens collecting service hours. This is great — the largest portion of the sales goes to the charity the store supports. But how many such charities can fully staff with just unpaid volunteers?

There are other stores with paid staff. Think Salvation Army and Goodwill. The last time I walked into Goodwill there was a sign that they’re now hiring, at $10.75 per hour. Or was that the Salvation Army? Anyway, these are chains, and they operate in less-well-off areas, and they simply don’t have a cadre of retirees and housewives willing and able to spend their time there.

Is one of these “better” than the other? I wouldn’t rate one type more highly than the other just for the volunteer vs. paid staff — it matters a lot more to me how well run the store is, and here Goodwill wins out over the Salvation Army stores anyday because they sort their clothing by size rather than by color, and trying to wade through a rack of women’s clothing, with sizes ranging from way, way too small to way, way too big is not worth my time.

What about the accusations that Goodwill pays its CEO too much? I leave it to the reader to decide if that’s a deal-breaker; there are certainly many non-profit organizations that feel that they need to operate in a businesslike fashion, and hire corporate talent at the market rate in order to thrive.

Now the Huffington Post article’s comments contains a number of accusations that the Goodwill employees skim the best goods off the top for themselves before they get put out on the sale floor, and an equal number of defenses that there are corporate procedures to prevent exactly that, and that if it happens, it’s a violation of policy at a given store, not a systemic issue. But any thrift store is at risk of unscrupulous volunteers or employees doing the same.

And the third category: for-profit companies. Around here, that’s Savers. They’re the ones that “partner” with a charity, the Epilepsy Foudation, specifically, and send mailers out that they’ll be picking up donations on a certain day and asking for you to call to schedule the truck to stop. But the Epilepsy folks don’t get the net proceeds of your donated goods — they just get a small amount of money per pickup, regardless of the value of the items in the bags you leave at the front porch. Is it a rip-off, then? No, not really — as long as you understand what’s really going on: Savers is fundamentally a company that will allow you to recycle your used, but sellable, goods, in a convenient manner. And the Savers stores — or at least the one I’ve been at — are a good place to shop, with a nice selection of merchandise, well organized for shopping, and that’s important. Even someone looking for bargain prices deserves a good shopping experience, rather than being told that, at your price point, you have to suck it up and hunt through the racks for your size.

Second point: if you are a prospective donor, you should understand the nature of your donation.

The fundamental objective of any thrift store is to resell your goods at a profit. Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and your local thrift store benefiting a women’s shelter, all have this objective. They are not about providing affordable clothing for the poor, and you shouldn’t be making your donation with the objective of helping to clothe the poor.

To be clear: if you want to clothe the poor, this is not how to do it.

If you have clothes that are in good condition and in current style, then there may be ways of getting them directly to people in need. Crisis pregnancy centers are happy to take maternity clothes and baby clothes — again, in good condition and in reasonably current styles. Even pregnant women in need don’t want stained clothes, and it’s offensive to their dignity to expect otherwise. If you have business clothes, you may be able to find a charity that accepts them for folks out on the job market.

But your generic jeans, or t-shirts? Most charities don’t want these, and aren’t equipped to run a clothing closet, and the poor would generally rather have a bit of cash and be able to choose from among the options at a secondhand store. And things that are stained, or ripped, or t-shirts from that fun run you did some years ago? Nope, don’t expect that ridding your home of these is a form of charity.

If you have high-quality clothing and don’t like the idea of a middle-class person finding this at the Goodwill, let alone reselling it online, then take it to a consignment store, or sell it on e-bay yourself. There are even consignment-type options online, where you send a bag of clothes in and they tell you how much it’s worth. Do the same thing with your furniture, or your gently-used electronics — or recognize that if you don’t want to, then the organization that you give them to is doing you a favor by taking your unwanted items.

And for G_d’s sake, don’t give your good stuff to the Epilepsy pickup under the illusion that top-notch goods will help those poor epileptic children more.

Oh, and as a side note: thrift stores can’t sell things that are out-of-season. Sure, they’ll accept them, but they won’t show up on the shelves, and instead will end up being sold wholesale somewhere else. But if you need to get rid of a box of kids’ shorts in January, don’t sweat it; it’s also important to keep a clean house.

In fact, in Germany, the secondhand store run by a charity doesn’t really exist. There are organizations that collect your castoffs, but they are much more open about it being a means of recycling your unwanted goods.

And what about your rags and stained items, and the things that aren’t worth much of anything?

To be honest, I’m of two minds here. As the Huffington Post article describes, some items end up as rags or filler. And some end up being shipped off to Africa instead. Is it unethical to participate in the process of selling items to Africa, which is accused of destroying their local textile industry? I don’t know; it’s your call, reader. I go back and forth on whether I donate or discard t-shirts, for instance — and I do try to convert these into rags for cleaning at home, but at some point, you’ve got enough rags. There is one category that I will not donate, though, and those are articles of clothing that have shrunk, or have stretched out, so that the size on the label isn’t right any longer, since it just doesn’t seem right to contribute to a situation in which a customer buys something that, upon trying it on at home, is clearly the wrong size.

And, incidentally: all those t-shirts that you and your kids accumulate over the years? The best thing to do is not accumulate them in the first place. Certainly it’s no great charitable deed for some kid in Africa to end up with your son’s summer daycamp shirt.

One more thing: the fact that thrift stores are in business to earn money (whether as for-profit or non-profit enterprises) also means that they set the prices on their clothing based on what the market will bear, just like any other business. When a store is more expensive than you think they should be, or than other secondhand stores: they’ve concluded that’s the right price point for their market, or they think their merchandise is worth more because the goods they receive are higher quality, or they think their customer base is willing to pay more, knowing that it is a donation to the cause. They’re not gouging their customers, nor to they have an obligation to price things as cheaply as possible for the sake of poor customers.

So that’s it from me. What knowledge and experience with thrift stores can you share in the comments?

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACommunityClosetThriftStoreItems.jpg; By Sparklingdawg (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

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