It’s a good feeling, when you donate some of your old stuff instead of throwing it away. No one likes to feel like they’re being wasteful, and if you can give your lightly used clothes a second home, why not do it? Or your lightly used fetish-wear? Or your lightly used dildos?
WELL, maybe don’t actually donate your lightly used dildos. No one wants to buy them, no one even really wants to look at them. Those are garbage, and you know it – so don’t make some poor, unfortunate soul throw them away for you just so you can feel a little dopamine for once in your sorry life.
I’m sorry, that was heated. But come on – don’t be gross. These people will thank you for it:
26. Baby Faces:
Got a box full of rubber baby faces once. Must have been about two dozen of them. Sold them to some guy who had never come in before for 6 bucks. What a steal.
25. Everything she owned:
This was 7 years ago now. Had a lady, late thirties, donate everything in her house. A whole moving truck full. I didn’t notice anything until it was almost empty, she was acting nostalgic, yet semi flippant about giving it all away.
At the end she asked if she could pray for me and the co-worker that helped unload the truck. It was only a few seconds after she drove away that I had a sinking feeling about this lady. I told my boss that nothing about this lady seemed right… Ended up racing through some of the boxes to look for info, found a bunch of journals and things from therapists over the years.
Turns out she’d been living with mental illness for most of her life, and was giving us all her stuff so she could go home and end her life. I asked my boss to call the police, and an officer apparently contacted her sister, and they prevented her from committing suicide that day.
I’m unsure if she’s still alive today, but I hope she wasn’t mad at me for trying to help. :/
24. Ill-used stuffed animals:
I’ve seen a giant 3 ft inflatable penis (that we named peter), a hand grenade, and an entertainment center with a bird nest inside. I actually haven’t seen that many sex toys while producing.
We do get plenty of sh*t that should’ve just ended up at the dump (TVs, moss covered stuff, literal garbage bags) and most of the time we aren’t allowed to say no to a donation unless it specifically has a TV, mattress, or gasoline powered object.
You’d be amazed at how many stuffed animals we get that have all kinds of funky stains covering them.
23. The clothes of the deceased:
Not goodwill but uk charity shop.. to name a few of the weird things we’ve had a small bag of human teeth, a box of plastic spiders, various bdsm kits/outfits, a pillow shaped like a pair of boobs, inflatable sumo suits.. pretty much every day we get something along those lines in.
I’d say the most interesting but also the saddest was when we had a lady ask if her friend could donate a serious amount of clothes. Turned out her friend lost his wife 4 years ago and had only just felt ready to let go.
Whilst we were going through the donation, lots of the clothes still had tags on. Heartbreaking to think she just never had the chance to wear them and that some of the worn items where things he’d picture his wife in after she’d gone
Edit: oh and underwear, we get lots of dirty underwear in
22. Legit gold jewelry:
We got a HELLA expensive gold necklace, like, $1,500. Our price printer only went up to 999, so that small necklace in a bag had TWO price tags on it. My manager put up a sign on the front door saying it existed if someone wanted to buy it. I was in shock as to why someone would just DONATE an expensive jewelry necklace. It was insane.
Someone came in wanting to buy it and the manager had to sell it to him cause a lowly cashier might fuck it up.
Except my manager, fucking up, only scanned one of the price tags. She got fired by a higher up for missing out on $500.
21. Doubledongers:
I worked for them many years ago. Good work, good pay, good cauhahaHAHAHA fuck Goodwill.
We got dildos sometimes, big doubledongers. One time we got a bag of stinky clothes, we don’t wash them so whatever. We opened the bag after they drove off and there was a rotting, bloody rabbit pelt in one of the shirts. We constantly got sneaky f*ckers trying to illegally dump mattresses and lawnmowers, sh*t we don’t take, but they do sell them, because Goodwill is the echelon of fucking bullsh*t without any standards or regulations.
Legit great people, though.
20. So much fetish-wear:
Not a goodwill worker but i do work in a locally owned charity shop. We’ve gotten all sorts of things from an antique gramophone to weird shit like fetish wear.
Theres no limit to what people donate really and it keeps things interesting when we inevitably have to sort through it all.
Sometimes people do dump their garbage for us to clean up though or rummage through our bins. Its kinda nasty, but its part of what keeps me interested in the work i do.
19. Millions of dollars worth of stuff:
Ha. Ohhhh yeah.
I used to work at a place in Canberra called “The Green Shed”. Place was pretty eye opening. It’s attached to the council transfer station (where people dump things for landfill). You drive in, to dump you turn left, to recycle your appliance, furniture or whatever you turn right to the green shed and drop it off for free. The stuff is then resold very cheap to the public. It looks and feels very charitable and good for the environment.
Turns out the place is privately owned. And, Canberra turning over something like 60% of its population every year due to all the politicians, military and government personnel on annual contracts, and with all of these individuals highly paid, you get a surplus of near new fully decked out apartments because the guy has to move back to Melbourne in two weeks and he just wants to donate all his stuff to a charity instead of selling it. New 60 inch TVs in the box. All sorts of things. And everyone in Canberra believes this place is a charity.
They’re turning over about $2m a year and have almost no running costs. It gets crazier.
They have a pickup service. I went to pick up a fridge from a girl who was moving interstate the next day. She gladly paid us $100 for the privilege of donating her fully operational fridge that we immediately test and tagged and sold for $80 about 2hrs later. Many times I would pickup entire households worth of furniture and appliances and still somehow charged the customer $800 or so for the job, and then resold the donated items for another $800 all in one day.
People in Canberra praise this place because they publicly donated $10k to a charity. It’s regarded as an amazing system for recycling. It’s not like they accept things that are broken. Half the stuff they accept gets thrown away anyway.
To answer your question. Some people donated small yachts. I saw a golf cart. Old cars and more are regularly donated and then sold for real, tangible money. That a private company earns.
Edit: I really need to add some emphasis here, there are regularly LINEUPS of cars wanting to drop stuff off at the green shed. I believe there are many, many people dropping off goods there they could otherwise sell, but they feel like the green shed’s service exists and is legitimised by the council or state government (who award them the contract) as a charitable environmental push, but it absolutely isn’t.