That Exciting Thing!
Sep. 11th, 2014 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captain_slinkyYesterday we bought some 200 POUNDS of unsorted toys from the Goodwill Outlet in Everett. It's a new thing they're testing out there, and it's pretty darned exciting to have been a part of the "First Wave" of customers that get to iron out the kinks in the system!
RECAP OF HOW GOODWILL OUTLET WORKS: Unlike a traditional Goodwill Thrift Store, the Goodwill Outlet rolls out dozens of giant bins (15'x4'x1') full of unpriced, barely sorted items that you the customer then sorts through to find what you want and pay by the *pound* rather than by the item. Prices are crazy-cheap, 49-cents per pound for most stuff and $1.49 a pound for clothes. They do a minimal sorting of the items in order to remove huge/heavy things like furniture and slap a price tag on it, and occasionally they also take out stuff that they know is worth putting in the "collectables case" with a price tag on it. We usually come out of there with a carload of stuff for anywhere between $5 and $20, depending on how heavy the stuff we needed ended up being.
The mixed-blessing down-side of Goodwill Outlet shopping is that you share the experience with about a hundred strangers, half of which are really great folks and the other half of which are inconsiderate jerks. And so sometimes you get people ripping stuff out of your hands, or kids just destroying stuff because they can, or people shoving you out of the way, or at the very least people getting to stuff you wanted before you could get to it.
SO HOW THIS NEW THING WORKS: You can call the Goodwill Outlet on Monday Morning and sign up for a "spot" on the Toy Schedule. For $40 (payable at the time of your appointment) they will seal off a section of the sales floor and wheel out two bins of UNSORTED TOYS for you AND ONLY YOU (well, you and whoever you invite to join you)You get an HOUR to comb through the bins and take as much or as little as you like!
I signed up for Day 2 and decided to share the experience with my old pals, Matt & Rebecca. The plan was set that we would meet at GWO at four on Wednesday and split one of these things up.
But then I saw people actually DOING their bins on Day 1 and things devolved in to each family really *needing* their own hour.
On Day 1 I saw two of three different rounds. The first one (which I didn't see) apparently had a TON of American Girl dolls and accessories which made the buyer VERY happy. The second on (which I *did* see) the lady wasn't too happy with because ALL THERE WAS WAS A BUNCH OF SEALED VINTAGE STAR WARS AND STAR TREK MODEL KITS (I about fainted; all she had wanted was baby toys to try and resell at consignment stores). The third one was a guy I know and his bins didn't *look* that great at first, till he started digging - Super Mario, Luigi and Pikachu figural backpacks, new with tags... the ones that sell for $40 each at convention! And despite there not being much to look at at first, he ended up with two giant carts FULL of stuff by the end and smiling from ear to ear :)
I'm not entirely sure what Matt & Rebecca got in their bins, I showed up near the end of their hour but the ended up filling their car full enough that it seemed their son would have to find a job locally and wait till they could come back to pick him up in a month or two.
Our bin was a hit/miss; I had hoped to come away with a ton of stuff for conventions, ended up with just the tiniest bit of convention-worthy stuffs (a vintage Happy Days game, a Hello Kitty Pillow Pet). A bunch of new-condition Ravensberger and Melissa & Doug toys that will go to a consignment shop, some scooters and others kid vehicles that will go on Craigslist, a bunch of "traditional" board games (Life, Clue, Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders) that we will use to fill our Community Game Night Library (that's for a different post)...
And the STAR of our bin, about TWELVE POUNDS OF LEGO.
Unsorted, random lots of Lego usually sell on Ebay for between $10 and $20 per pound!
No matter how you look at it, I think we're going to at least TRIPLE our investment here - AND it was a lot of fun to do it :)
RECAP OF HOW GOODWILL OUTLET WORKS: Unlike a traditional Goodwill Thrift Store, the Goodwill Outlet rolls out dozens of giant bins (15'x4'x1') full of unpriced, barely sorted items that you the customer then sorts through to find what you want and pay by the *pound* rather than by the item. Prices are crazy-cheap, 49-cents per pound for most stuff and $1.49 a pound for clothes. They do a minimal sorting of the items in order to remove huge/heavy things like furniture and slap a price tag on it, and occasionally they also take out stuff that they know is worth putting in the "collectables case" with a price tag on it. We usually come out of there with a carload of stuff for anywhere between $5 and $20, depending on how heavy the stuff we needed ended up being.
The mixed-blessing down-side of Goodwill Outlet shopping is that you share the experience with about a hundred strangers, half of which are really great folks and the other half of which are inconsiderate jerks. And so sometimes you get people ripping stuff out of your hands, or kids just destroying stuff because they can, or people shoving you out of the way, or at the very least people getting to stuff you wanted before you could get to it.
SO HOW THIS NEW THING WORKS: You can call the Goodwill Outlet on Monday Morning and sign up for a "spot" on the Toy Schedule. For $40 (payable at the time of your appointment) they will seal off a section of the sales floor and wheel out two bins of UNSORTED TOYS for you AND ONLY YOU (well, you and whoever you invite to join you)You get an HOUR to comb through the bins and take as much or as little as you like!
I signed up for Day 2 and decided to share the experience with my old pals, Matt & Rebecca. The plan was set that we would meet at GWO at four on Wednesday and split one of these things up.
But then I saw people actually DOING their bins on Day 1 and things devolved in to each family really *needing* their own hour.
On Day 1 I saw two of three different rounds. The first one (which I didn't see) apparently had a TON of American Girl dolls and accessories which made the buyer VERY happy. The second on (which I *did* see) the lady wasn't too happy with because ALL THERE WAS WAS A BUNCH OF SEALED VINTAGE STAR WARS AND STAR TREK MODEL KITS (I about fainted; all she had wanted was baby toys to try and resell at consignment stores). The third one was a guy I know and his bins didn't *look* that great at first, till he started digging - Super Mario, Luigi and Pikachu figural backpacks, new with tags... the ones that sell for $40 each at convention! And despite there not being much to look at at first, he ended up with two giant carts FULL of stuff by the end and smiling from ear to ear :)
I'm not entirely sure what Matt & Rebecca got in their bins, I showed up near the end of their hour but the ended up filling their car full enough that it seemed their son would have to find a job locally and wait till they could come back to pick him up in a month or two.
Our bin was a hit/miss; I had hoped to come away with a ton of stuff for conventions, ended up with just the tiniest bit of convention-worthy stuffs (a vintage Happy Days game, a Hello Kitty Pillow Pet). A bunch of new-condition Ravensberger and Melissa & Doug toys that will go to a consignment shop, some scooters and others kid vehicles that will go on Craigslist, a bunch of "traditional" board games (Life, Clue, Monopoly, Chutes & Ladders) that we will use to fill our Community Game Night Library (that's for a different post)...
And the STAR of our bin, about TWELVE POUNDS OF LEGO.
Unsorted, random lots of Lego usually sell on Ebay for between $10 and $20 per pound!
No matter how you look at it, I think we're going to at least TRIPLE our investment here - AND it was a lot of fun to do it :)
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no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 10:32 pm (UTC)Sounds like a pretty fun thing to do. Do they do the same thing at the Seattle Goodwill Outlet?
no subject
Date: 2014-09-11 10:41 pm (UTC)