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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
[+] [-] supernova87a|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ralph84|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewrv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
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"
[+] [-] analog31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] florin_g|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonytrary|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] publicola1990|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floren|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andrew_|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wheybags|4 years ago|reply
1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbBZM9aUMsjEM76RFMofB...
[+] [-] II2II|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] banana_giraffe|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] michrassena|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HysteriaStrange|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heavyset_go|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astronautjones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] legitster|4 years ago|reply
I still feel bad about that.
[+] [-] massysett|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sjg007|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ehw3|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cable2600|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] neilv|4 years ago|reply
* 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.)
[+] [-] bombcar|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nostromo|4 years ago|reply
They should pay Goodwill for managing to prevent so much stuff from needing to be trashed in the first place.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
I can't tell if they're being sarcastic.
[+] [-] isitdopamine|4 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] ivan1783|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marmot777|4 years ago|reply
I have noticed people do drop some janky stuff off at Goodwill that should really go to the dump.
[+] [-] mattr47|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nwah1|4 years ago|reply
This field is also ripe for innovation.
[+] [-] clintonb|4 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] smileysteve|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] treeman79|4 years ago|reply
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. ...
[+] [-] teeray|4 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] Fooloo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunsipples|4 years ago|reply