New Orleans         When “thrifting” became a verb of some kind it was signal that a generation was taking the classic rummage sales to a whole new level.  I’ve spent no small amount of time over the years sitting in a vehicle or ambling between the rows while mi companera or daughter saw some place that couldn’t be passed up.  Once leaving a funeral in Tulsa, Oklahoma for a dear uncle, my daughter had us pull over on the way to the airport at one of the most mammoth I’ve ever seen.  For years, my dear departed mother served on the board of the New Orleans Goodwill store.  In short, I’ve been there, even if I haven’t really done that.

Goodwill Industries and its stores are all 501c3 nonprofits organized in a federated fashion in different communities and territories around the country.  They may have the same name and affiliation, but they can easily be all different.  Their revenue supports job placement and training programs largely.

Over the last several decades as I’ve worked internationally, it has been impossible not to notice the wide variety and number of nonprofits in places like England that depend on charity shops to fund their operations, whether Oxfam or Greenpeace or whatever.  Rather than being close to the hood, as many in my experience have been in the US, I would run into these ubiquitous charity shops on high streets in city after city, where it was clear they were harvesting from the fields of the middle class, rather than lower income families.

I read with interest a piece in the Wall Street Journal with a headline claiming that Goodwill was having a “glamour makeover.”  I thought, really?  It had only been a couple of months since I found myself driving behind stores in a mall along the Gulf Coast to leave some lamps and whatnots alongside a pile of stacked up plastic garbage bags of clothes and whatever.  It seems in some areas, like Arizona, Goodwill execs are opening bigger and fancier stores in more upscale neighbors, not to be nearer lower income families looking for bargains, but to make themselves more convenient drop off spots for richer donors.  The article went on to say that the network has abandoned the notion of keeping 9 or 10 miles between stores and shrinking the space to as little as 3 miles to take advantage of GenZ shoppers who will sometimes troll multiple stores in one day in search of hidden treasurers.  Contrary to my experience, many of the stores now have separate storage rooms so people don’t drop their bags behind or in front of stores.  One store operator talked about his efforts to change the smell of their stores in his area from musty to linen with a tropical scent.

As this thrifting trend has grown and young consumers are prioritizing sustainability, sometimes over fast fashion and filling up dumpsters, Goodwill and its ilk have been huge beneficiaries with soaring sales creating more surplus money for their expansion, and, hopefully, the expansion of their programs to serve the community.  I say hopefully, because this makeover could also make lower cost clothing and goods less available to low income and working families who have been the Goodwill base for decades.  Sales of $5.5 billion across the network are great if the money is really going to community programs, but other reports of local Goodwill CEOs making over a million dollars in salary, even if that’s not the average, are telltale signs of serious mission creep.  One manager had hired influencers to wear used clothing and hype it all on TikTok and elsewhere, which says quite a lot about who some of these nonprofits see as their customer market.

I don’t want to be a Debbie-downer about Goodwill, a comrade nonprofit.  I want them to be wildly successful and popular, but I can’t help worrying about whether, in the common refrain that marked the farmworkers movement, they are “keeping their eyes on the grape.”