Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

For example, yesterday this Goodwill had a production goal of $4,787 worth of sorted, priced clothes. It beat that goal by producing 1,115 garments worth $5,657. Most of that production won’t sell here. At this store, roughly 45 percent of the product on the sales floor sells (up from 33 percent a few years ago). That’s high for an American thrift store, but maintaining that sales percentage is incredibly difficult. During a walkthrough, Kevin Cunningham, director of retail operations for Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, summarized the challenge for me: Think of it as Walmart headquarters calling a Walmart store manager and saying, “You’ve got a truck of product coming.” The manager is like, “Okay, yeah, I know.” And the manager in HQ is like, “And oh, by the way, we don’t know what’s in that truck—no one thing in the truck is the same as any other one thing. And oh, by the way, you need to price all of it. And oh, by the way, you definitely need to make a profit selling it.”