[ehw3]

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.

[tomcam]

Well that was kind of an amazing story! Thank you for the share.

[HysteriaStrange]

There are still a few Goodwill organizations that do this- Seattle, Denver and Wisconsin off the top of my head. Most of their sales are on eBay.