A woman who bought a glass vase for $3.99 at a local Goodwill charity shop has seen the piece auctioned off for more than $100,000 after it turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
Jessica Vincent had bought the item at a Goodwill thrift store in Hanover county, Virginia, and had an inkling that it might have been worth a little more than was usual, she told the New York Times.
“I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece, but I had no clue how good it actually was until I did a little bit more research,” she told the paper after noticing a small ‘M’ on its bottom which she suspected might stand for Murano, an Italian island near Venice famed for glasswork.
Thrift stores in America are usually corporate and not for charity. Or, they pretend to be charities (but aren’t)
Goodwill is fucking evil.
Forgive my ignorance, why is goodwill evil?
There’s a lot that I could say, but it simply boils down to them always favoring their corporate and ceo’s interests over their charitable ones.
Their ceo (and branch ceo’s) make obscene amounts of money.
Theres also that case and probably even more about an autistic woman being paid like less than 25c an hour.
Probably “evil” isn’t the right word, but they absolutely do not have “good-will”
I can’t look at their advertising without finding the company gross and exploitative. Every single ad is filled with people with developmental disabilities and it has this imagery of “Look at us, if it weren’t for Goodwill these people would be nowhere”. It comes off like they’re using these people as mascots and it weirds me out.
On top of that, their prices are garbage anymore. Might as well buy them all new! My local thrift store is so much better.
Exactly they advertise how great they are by hiring disabled people. Which fools the boomers. But in reality they hire them because law says they can legally pay them way below minimum wage.
Also keep in mind everything they sell was 100% given to them by donations. So they make butt loads while exploiting labor.
I looked at their 2022 990 and their CEO made 600k, which for an organization doing $61m in business is on the very low end. I see 3.5m to 13 paid employees of Goodwill.
There are ICs associated and I’m not interested in delving into that right now, but I don’t have any information available right now to say the CEO of Goodwill is making a buttload.
Paying an autistic employee peanuts is deplorable, but hopefully a one-off by some CEO wannabe/neverbe who thinks he knows how to do business.
I’m all about calling out “charitable” organizations, but the first thing I do is check their 990. And I’ll be completely honest, this may just be one branch of Goodwill’s larger umbrella, but it’s probably a decent example with 61m in revenue. I’m sitting in a cabana at Kalahari while my two year old eats a bar so I’m phoning it in, literally.
The optics of paying disabled people shit wages is not good, but consider that those workers are otherwise unemployable. Goodwill is probably still losing money on a lot of them even with the super low wage.
If you force a higher wage, goodwill is simply going to replace them with abled people who can do the job much more efficiently and reliably.
The idea is that people under these circumstances should already be fully supported by disability pay (yes I know disability pay is broken right now, I’m talking about ideally here) or a guardian or caregiver, and their goodwill job is something for them to do to help with socialization, practice doing hands on tasks, and getting some pocket money.
If disabled people are struggling to make ends meet because they make $4/hr at goodwill, that’s a failure of our society at taking care of a less abled person, not goodwill. Nobody whose only option is to work at goodwill due to disability should need to be working at all. I’m not a Marxist but some level of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” isn’t a bad thing.
I do have other bones to pick with goodwill, but I’m pretty neutral on the disabled workers thing.
Yeah, I mentioned in a comment below but I agree with what you say. And as far as I’m aware, if you qualify for this less-than-minimum wage, you’re also entitled to a number of other safety nets. People who are mentally and physically able to work presumably wouldn’t be getting paid this rate; folks who have some mental or physical impairment that prevents them from working (and at the same time entitled them to disability, amongst other things), would.
So yeah, lots of words saying I agree.
I know for a fact they pay them 2 bucks an hour they brag about it at the training facility.
Yeah, I mean, they’re not breaking a law to do so, but I think we all agree that isn’t necessarily a high bar. But the law was put in place, initially, to get disabled WW1 vets back into jobs. The alternative, I suppose, is these folks don’t get hired. I don’t like the alternative, but I don’t like seeing them get paid less either. It’s the middle ground.