Harry F.

As if Goodwill doesn't make enough $ money $ accepting donations for free, over charging in their stores... now Goodwill offers donated goods online for ridiculous prices. These items are often broken, dirty or just junk. From the time the item is donated to being handled and shipped several times, is not packed carefully and will be bumped around, which may affect quality.

Even worse - Goodwill is driven by profit, with the highest generating sales coming from online auctions. If the profit margins drop, employees are often fired with no notice. Other employees have their hours drastically reduced, and full time employees lose benefits with the reduction in hours. For an employee only earning minimum wage, this is catastrophic. Goodwill does not care if the employee worked at the company for 10 years or more, or how skilled they are, anyone can be fired or hours cut at any time... it's a scary place to work. All the while their profits soar from online auctions. Think about it... employee earns minimum wage. Jewelry lot sells $250 online, all donated. Yet Goodwill can't afford to pay their employees?

Another thing - online auctions mean the donated items do not go back into the community but instead are sold to the highest bidder. Goodwill policy says employees must select the best, high quality items and books/media to put into auction. This also means thousands of items are throwb in the trash or recycled because there are quotas to meet for the auction. In order to get the good stuff, you have to process alot of donated goods quickly and go through a large amount. There is no time to process and sort everything so it gets thrown out, unless it can generate profit.

Also auction do not go to the store shelves. People who may not be able to afford these items are not given a chance to buy them unless they go online and engage in a bidding war. There are non profits who actually do offer high quality items to needy people for free or cheap, Goodwill is NOT one!

Finally, Goodwill stores compete with each other over sales and auction items. There arw bonuses and incentives given for putting items in auction and sales. At some point in the future, each Goodwill store will have its own auction dept... and Goodwill will compete with Amazon as an online retailer.