It’s the rare object that’s passed from generation to generation. And it’s an even rarer object that increases in value over time. As the volume of stuff surges, it’s only natural that consumers entrust the care of things to others. An independently owned antique store or collectible mall should be able to obtain value from the handful of truly valuable objects in a home. Anyone can sell a diamond necklace. But twenty-five used wool sweaters per week? That requires somebody with money, patience, and plenty of other products to sell while the sweaters don’t move.
For decades, that role has been fulfilled by thrift stores. And no set of thrift stores has been more successful in squeezing the value out of the everyday objects in an American home than Goodwill Industries International. In 2017, it generated $5.87 billion in retail sales, making it the king of an American thrift trade that generated at least $17.5 billion in revenue. Its business model is widely imitated, both in the United States and abroad. For Americans, it’s the brand that represents an entire industry, the Kleenex of charitable giving. It’s the past, and the future, of what’s left behind.
By mid-afternoon, the donations are coming without interruption at the Goodwill on South Houghton and East Golf Links Roads in Tucson. Inside the donation door, gray pushcarts overflow with jigsaw puzzles, sofa cushions, picture frames, pillowcases filled with clothing and shoes, two high chairs, and at least one vacuum cleaner. I also spot a bag of garbage—actual garbage—that someone dropped off; three uneaten Hershey’s Kisses, tinfoil still intact, spill out. Outside, a headboard with a coffee table propped against it blocks half the entrance, and two carts, one covered with fake house plants, blocks the other half. Scattered around the perimeter are an awkward ancient rowing machine and several large, taped-up boxes. I’ve been here all day, and I can’t remember seeing most of these items unloaded from vehicles.
The flood isn’t likely to let up. Four cars are in line awaiting the chance to donate, and—according to Michelle Janse, an unflappable forty-three-year-old with a social critic’s eye for what passes through the donation door—the rush is only beginning. She’s just punched in to help.
Next in line, an elderly gentleman slowly steps from a Nissan Frontier pickup carrying a pair of fur-lined hunting boots. “Gave a pair to my ex-wife, she loved them,” he announces. “Cost a hundred and fifty bucks. Gave this pair to my current wife, she hates them. Says I gave a pair to my ex-wife.” Janse takes them with a look of distaste and, as she turns, calls out, “Thanks for your donation! It supports twenty-two employees at our store!” She turns to me and says, “That’s our mission statement this month.”
Next in line is a white Impala with New Mexico plates. I recognize the driver—a teenage girl in a striped, sleeveless T-shirt who dropped off at least a dozen garbage bags full of clothes and linens not more than thirty minutes ago. This time she opens the trunk to reveal boxes of dishes. “This is all from my grammy. She’s kind of a hoarder. We had a garage sale …” She shrugs.
Janse pauses to gaze at the haul.
“This isn’t too much stuff, is it?” the girl asks with a hint of panic.
“Nope! We can’t refuse donations—only certain categories like mattresses and hazardous chemicals.”
“Oh good. We were worried you wouldn’t take it all.”
Janse unloads the boxes onto a cart. As she pushes the haul through the donation door, she shakes her head. “Garage sales aren’t where it’s at anymore. Half the stuff doesn’t sell because the prices are too high. Everyone thinks they’re on Antiques Roadshow.” She reaches for a green glass vase that’s resting atop a pile of garbage bags stuffed with clothes. It has a pink, handwritten two-dollar garage-sale price tag on it. “People see that and they know they can get it cheaper at a thrift store.”
“They do?”
Boom.
Behind me, Frank Kaphan, a stout fifty-year-old former construction worker, slams a garbage bag full of clothes onto a large, overflowing washing-machine-size carton of clothes. His face is drenched in sweat, and his shoulders tighten as he lifts the garbage bag over his head again. Boom.
Michelle rolls her eyes. “That’s how we fit more when we’re running out of boxes,” she explains. “We’re not supposed to get on top and jump.” It’s a safety violation. Boom. “Donations arriving,” she says, and heads back out the door.
During its 2018–2019 fiscal year, Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, comprising around forty stores and donation centers in the Tucson area, received 504,519 individual donations. They included everything from sofas to baseball card collections, with each donation averaging 60 pounds. Conservatively estimated, that’s around thirty million pounds of stuff, out of the more than fifty million pounds of stuff that the half million people in this modest-sized American city sold or donated that year.
That’s nothing.
In 2015, Americans tossed out 24.1 billion pounds of furniture and furnishings, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Along with all those old sofas went 32 billion pounds of textiles—including clothes, bedsheets, towels, and wiping rags—and 45.3 billion pounds of what the Environmental Protection Agency calls “miscellaneous durables.” This catch-all comprises products that aren’t generally destroyed in the course of use, including everything from rakes to forks and spoons, jigsaw puzzles to jigsaws, rotary telephones to smartphones. It’s a flood that’s yet to crest.
After Tucson’s garage sales close on Saturday mornings, the Goodwill at South Houghton and East Golf Links Roads receives the flood of what didn’t sell.
Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona is a midsize Goodwill organization among the 162 regional, autonomous Goodwills in the United States and Canada. Collectively, they operate more than three thousand stores and donation centers and divert more than three billion pounds of stuff from the trash heap annually. In other words, Goodwill International collected just 3 percent of the clothes, furniture, and miscellaneous durables tossed out by Americans in the middle years of an affluent decade.
And it collected more than anybody.
In February 1932, Scientific American published “Jobs from Junk—Wages from Waste,” a brief feature introducing Goodwill to its readers. The organization was three decades old at that point, but most Americans were just starting to hear about it and other charities that accepted old goods as donations. According to the author, the benefits of giving weren’t just spiritual. The average American home had fifteen dollars’ worth of unused goods in the attic, and to most Americans those unused items were a “burden, contributing nothing to their welfare or happiness.” Goodwill not only took that burden off their hands, but it employed the poor in repairing and refurbishing those unwanted goods—especially clothing—and sold them for many times the value they had in the attic.
It was a model of charity that could exist only in an era of mass production and consumption. Before the industrial revolution, churches often collected clothes for the poor. But as cheap store-bought clothes eroded the need to make clothes at home, hand-sewing skills declined, and the financial incentive to repair and remake garments began to evaporate. Changing fashions, and the perpetual need to upgrade and evolve one’s wardrobe, accelerated the trend. As more and more Americans could afford new clothes, the distance between the poor and the rich became one defined by taste; the poor could dress just as elegantly as the rich, as long as they were open to being a season or two out-of-date. Closets and attics grew, as did the belief that one could be burdened with too much stuff.1
Charities seized the opportunity. In 1865, the Salvation Army was founded to evangelize to the urban poor of London. To make it work, the organization employed the city’s indigent to collect, repair, and sell unwanted goods. It expanded to New York in 1897, where it built so-called industrial homes to house the collectors, repair operations, and evangelization operations. The homes were multistory and included retail stores (where poor consumers could be recruited for work) and shipping areas, which evolved into donation centers.
Around the same time, the Reverend Edgar James Helms took over Boston’s Methodist Morgan Chapel and began a program to collect and repair clothes in local neighborhoods. As part of the collection program, the Morgan Chapel distributed burlap coffee bags to middle-class homes. These “opportunity bags” (soon to be renamed “Goodwill bags”) were then returned with unwanted but repairable stuff. It was a successful model that expanded to Brooklyn, where the name Goodwill Industries was adopted in 1915. By 1920, independent Goodwill branches were operating in six major American cities. The Methodist affiliation was eventually dropped, and Goodwill expanded rapidly, in part because of its interdenominational nature and appeal to a mass American audience.
Early on a Friday morning, I sit down with Lisa Allen and Liz Gulick, the co-presidents of Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona at the organization’s headquarters in a sparse office park on the south side of Tucson. Collectively, they oversee a roughly thirty-million-dollar enterprise that spans sixteen retail stores, two outlet stores, a boutique for higher-end secondhand merchandise (mostly clothes), several warehouses, a vast social services network, and more than five hundred full-time employees. Allen oversees the retail and operations side of the charity, and she speaks in the fast, efficient sentences of someone deeply immersed in the American culture of selling stuff. “Goodwill has forty-seven percent of the thrift market in Southern Arizona. Ten years ago, it was twenty to twenty-three.” Allen, with a traditional retailing background, isn’t shy about letting me know that boost happened under her leadership. “It was an intentional development. We thought we were underserving the market.”
“How do you know you’re underserving a secondhand market?”
“You do an assessment,” she says. “You see the unemployment rate and see that the community needs more training.” It’s not an answer to the question that I was asking. Instead, it’s the answer to a more important question: What motivates Goodwill? It’s not profit for profit’s sake. Rather, the first motivation is social distress—youth unemployment, for example. Then Goodwill figures out how to pay for the solutions. “Stores are our economic engine, helping us connect people with jobs.”
It’s the identical mission that Goodwill had in the 1890s, but with one significant difference. Rather than employ the urban poor in repair shops or Goodwill stores, Goodwill now uses its professionally managed stores to fund social services focused on helping people become economically self-sufficient through work. Liz Gulick seems reluctant to speak over her co-president, even though she manages the half of Goodwill that uses the money earned in the stores. But when there’s some space, I prompt her. “The mission is what we’re all about,” she reminds me. “It’s why we do what we do, and everybody is a part of it. We have five-hundred-plus employees here, and forty, fifty of them are just devoted to career development in the community.”
The individuals taken on by Goodwill are often the hardest, most expensive cases, the ones that government won’t, or can’t, handle on its own; and they—not secondhand stuff—inspire the greatest passion among Goodwill employees (regardless of whether those employees are involved in social services). For example, Pima County, home to Tucson, has a large population of youths who haven’t completed high school, many of whom end up in the juvenile justice system. So, under Gulick, the organization has refocused its efforts on helping them in ways ranging from paying for GED test-taking fees to subsidizing salaries so that skeptical employers will take on at-risk youth. “We had thirteen hundred job placements last year,” Gulick says. “So that tells you we’re using that economic engine in the right way.”
Allen nods in agreement. “The stores are the means by which we do what we do,” she says. “If they aren’t doing well, we have to look at ways to cut. If they are doing well, our options increase. So we are very focused on improving our store performance. But we are all invested in the work beyond retail that we do.”
“Do you hire people out of your programs for the stores?”
Allen shakes her head. “Rarely. The stores can be a tool. If somebody needs work clothes, we can make that happen. But the stores are separate. It’d be a conflict of interest, in a way. We want to place people in the community.”
Of course, not everybody loves Goodwill’s economic engine. As far back as the 1920s, for-profit junk dealers and thrift stores resented having to compete with charities that acquire inventory via donations. Yet despite these bumps, Goodwill is consistently given top ratings by organizations that rate philanthropic management. And in Southern Arizona, where Goodwill uses 90 percent of its donations for mission-oriented work, the organization is widely lauded for what it gives back to the community. It’s a crucial civic institution.
Inside the donation door at South Houghton and East Golf Links Roads, a Goodwill-donation tax-receipt book sits atop a neat desk, fluttering in a breeze cast by a fan. Across from it are eight bins, each six feet tall, called “cages.” The two closest to the desk are devoted to clothing. Next to them is a cage designated for linens and another holding a hodgepodge category of large durable goods that includes everything from a large planter to a tricycle—Goodwill calls them “large wares.” Next to them is a cage for “large electrical,” like hotplates, stereo receivers, and PCs. On it goes, to “small wares,” like silverware and children’s toys, CDs and DVDs, and shoes. Everything has a place.
Mike Mellors has returned from a break and starts work on the piles of donations, ripping into garbage bags and boxes. Clothes are tossed into their cage, piles of neatly folded bedsheets into theirs. At the bottom of one bag, he finds a tangle of rhinestone jewelry and Mardi Gras beads, plastic pendants, bangles, and knots of what look like silver and gold chains (“fake for sure,” he assures me). He drops the mass into a Tupperware pitcher on the standing desk nearly full with other gold and silver tangles. The next bag contains bedsheets, a paper party horn, a paper party hat, wire-rim sunglasses missing a lens, a Safeway card, and a nickel, which he tosses into a glass jar half full of coins that’s next to the one nearly full with cheap jewels. It looks random, but it’s not: Goodwill has strict guidelines for what can and cannot be on the desk, and bonuses are impacted by how well employees abide. In this way, Goodwill resists the junk.
I walk farther into the warehouse, past an area where furniture is laid out three sofas deep, and see two employees sorting through newly arrived wares beyond the dining room tables. Those are both important sources of revenue. But they can’t compare with clothing, which is both the organization’s most donated and most sold item.
Today, toward the far end of the warehouse, four women are busy with what Goodwill calls clothing “production.” The idea is a simple one: the process of sorting through cages of clothes, pricing them, and hanging them is a kind of manufacturing. But unlike in a traditional factory, where raw materials and parts are made into something new, Goodwill uses the cages of donated stuff to produce racks of clothes sorted by quality and price. As in a traditional factory, Goodwill has production targets. 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.”
Smart, market-sensitive pricing is the difference between selling the stuff rolling through the donation door, making less money at an outlet store or via an export market, or losing money down at the landfill. Experience, taste, and a sense of what’s happening at Walmart and other mass retailers figure into an ever-changing formulation. “If you price even with a Walmart, [Goodwill customers] won’t buy it,” Lisa Allen told me. “I have the numbers! People know the value of the stuff.”
“What if the quality is better at Goodwill?”
Allen smiled and shook her head.
Making matters more difficult, each of the sixteen Southern Arizona Goodwills serves a slightly different market. What sells for $6.99 in one part of town is likely too pricey for another. To manage these market differences and ensure the optimal pricing, Goodwill relies on hourly employees that it compensates with good benefits, above-average wages, and—above all—bonuses based on how well sales and production targets are met. Hopefully, they stay long enough to really know their markets. If they don’t, nobody does.
It’s time-consuming and expensive work that requires lots of workers, knowledge of the local market, and sound judgment. As much as possible, Goodwill tries to systematize it. For example, on the wall beside the sorting area is a sheet labeled $2.99 BRANDS that lists in-house labels from mass retailers like Target and Kohl’s. If a sorter picks up a top or a jacket from Old Navy, for example, or jeans from the in-house Target brand Mossimo, it’s $2.99, no exceptions, and the garment is tossed into a large cardboard box labeled $2.99. Later, it’ll be tagged accordingly, hung, and rolled out to the sales floor.
Upmarket brands are subjected to similar treatment. There’s a sheet labeled BOUTIQUE BRANDS TO PULL AND SEND. It includes a list of eighty-six labels—from Brooks Brothers to Zara—to be set aside for sale at Goodwill’s three-year-old high(er)-end boutique in an upscale neighborhood. “A pair of Miss Me jeans retails for $249 new,” Cunningham explained. “But we can’t get $6.99 for them here. People will look at the tag and say, ‘This is Goodwill?’ But at the boutique, they can go for $30 to $40.” It’s a savvy business move to compete with resellers who scavenge Goodwills for bargains that they mark up on eBay and other online platforms. Over the course of two weeks that I spent in and around Tucson-area Goodwills, several resellers complained to me that there aren’t as many bargains on Goodwill’s racks and shelves anymore. For the most part, that delights Goodwill. “We want that revenue,” Cunningham said. “The boutique helps us get it.”
Between the boutique and $2.99 is room for judgment, and large boxes for the $3.99, $4.99, and $6.99 price points. Mackenzie Williams is a sorter in her early twenties, with a long ponytail and a talkative manner. Like the others, she wears gloves to protect her hands from pins and other hazards in boxes two feet deep with donated clothing. “Talbots is a six,” she explains as she tosses a Talbots blouse into the $6.99 box. “A four is a not-so-great brand, and tank tops are a two.” She drops a blue halter into the $2.99 box. Next, she picks a green wool Dockers sweater from a cage and pulls it, searching for holes. “So this should be a six, because of the brand. But because it’s hot in Arizona, it’ll go as a four.” A plaid, short-sleeve men’s shirt is next. “Is David Taylor good?” she asks the other three sorters.
“Lemme see,” says Julie Sanchez, an assistant manager. She takes the shirt, removes a glove, and rubs the fabric between thumb and index finger. “Four.”
“How’d you know that?” I ask.
“Feel,” she answers as she flips the collar up. “Never mind. There’s holes in the collar. As is.” She hands it back to Kelsey, who tosses it into a box labeled AS IS bound for a Goodwill outlet store that will sell it and other garments by the pound.
Sanchez has sorted clothes far longer than Mackenzie, and she talks right past her younger co-worker. “The brands you see on that chart,” she says, referring to the $2.99 sheet. “You have to be careful. Quality has been declining for a couple years now. The clothes aren’t as good. I used to buy Mossimo at Target, but now I don’t. It falls apart after a single wash. We see it in the donations, stuff is so worn these days.”
“Are people just wearing their clothes harder?” I ask.
“People are making clothes cheaper.”
On the other side of the boxes, Kathie Greco, a quiet, older presence, pulls clothes from the $6.99 box, examines them, and, if the price is right in her experienced eyes, attaches a tag and hangs them on a rack. “People don’t seem to keep clothes as long anymore,” she pipes up. “And the people who make them know that and don’t bother to make good ones.” The data backs her up. Between 2000 and 2015, global clothing production doubled, while the average number of times that a garment was worn before disposal declined by 36 percent.2
Several factors account for those shifts, including the emergence of hundreds of millions of new consumers in China and greater Asia over the last three decades. To enable consumption, manufacturers in Asia, primarily, have become expert at making products that can be sold at an affordable price point. But for them to do so, the quality often suffers, and the lifespan of a garment is shortened. Key to the process is utilizing the low-cost labor and manufacturing processes located in emerging markets like Cambodia and Myanmar. By the 1990s, these practices made possible “fast fashion” and brands like Forever 21 and H&M.
These days, you no longer have to be wealthy or living in Paris or New York to have the latest catwalk look. You just need access to a mall or an internet connection. That’s a great thing for young, fashion-minded middle-class consumers, many of whom won’t wear a garment enough times to notice it falling apart in the wash. According to a 2018 survey by the online fashion reseller thredUP, millennials are the demographic most likely to discard a garment after one to five wears.3 If those garments were as well made as the high-end brands they’re meant to emulate, that’d be a wonderful thing for Goodwill. But, as Sanchez noted, they’re often no better than disposable, and—at best—bound for the “As Is” bin.
“Customers are all about price, not quality,” Cunningham told me when I asked him about the challenges of pricing at Goodwill. “They won’t buy a $6.99 shirt that’ll last. If that’s the option, they’ll buy a $2.99 shirt from Walmart. It’s all price.” It’s this combination of factors—whether applied to a tank top or a cheap sofa—that makes pricing so difficult and product quality a crucial concern to the donation-based thrift industry.
At six thirty A.M. on a Saturday, Cathy Zach, manager of the Goodwill at South Houghton and East Golf Links, is standing ten feet inside the donation door, inspecting inventory. “My warehouse is too clean,” she says. “Not enough stuff. Only five hundred dollars’ worth of wares produced yesterday.” She stops and looks at a cart holding two stereo receivers, a flat-screen television, a scanner, and three power bars. “But I’m really proud of electrical. For the first time in months, we’re above the production goal.”
Cathy is sixty-six, but she moves with the urgency of someone much younger. Today she has good reason. It’s Goodwill’s monthly 50 percent off sale, and the store will be swarmed with customers. At the front, she’ll be challenged to get everyone’s purchases checked out in a timely manner. Here in the back, she worries that there’s not enough stuff to meet all the demand—and the $14,087 sales goal for the day.
She wears an orange BOO CREW T-shirt promoting Goodwill’s Halloween products, a pair of loose-fitting jeans, and black Nike running shoes. Prior to Goodwill, she spent thirty-two years in traditional retail, including decades at Sears. Goodwill, she insists, is more challenging. “You have to have variety like no other retail environment,” she says. “People come here every day, and if they see the same stuff over and over and never notice something new, they’ll stop coming.”
To ensure that doesn’t happen, Goodwill changes the color of its price tags every week, enabling employees to track how long something has been on the sales floor with just a glance. Every six weeks, the cycle of colors is renewed, and six-week-old tags (and products) are pulled and placed in “As Is” bins. It’s a ruthless system that keeps customers interested, keeps revenues up, and—most crucially—ensures there’s always room on the shelves for the flood of stuff coming through the donation doors.
It’s also not unique to Goodwill. Around the world, thrift stores—keen to switch up inventory—do something similar.
For example, the nearly eight hundred stores that belong to Bookoff, the Yokohama-based used-goods chain, have four different color-coded price tags timed to the seasons. As a cycle ends, goods are taken off shelves and racks. Bookoff refers to the process as tokoroten, named after a Japanese noodle that’s made by pushing a seafood jelly through a press. “Customers doesn’t care how old something is. They care about how long it’s been on the shelf,” is how Takaharu Kominato, the Bookoff spokesperson, explained it to me. “Like food, old stuff goes bad. We call it a ‘poison apple.’ ”
Bookoff’s tokoroten is widely imitated across Japan’s secondhand industry, just as Goodwill’s six-week cycle is copied by thrift businesses across North America. Cathy picks up a clipboard detailing recent production and frets that there just isn’t enough that’s new to interest her regulars. “That’ll kill you in this business, if you don’t have variety. Gotta have everything out there every day. And we need more wares.”
Cathy gazes at the roughly 60 people gathering outside the front doors. “Some of them are stashers,” she tells me. “They come in the night before and stash items in hiding places so they get fifty percent off today.” In the clothing section, she reaches into a trench coat and pulls out two oil paintings. “Julie, can you take these?”
Julie Sanchez rushes over, grabs them, and looks at the prices listed on the backs as she walks off. “They’re only $2.99!”
Cathy points to racks of shirts sorted by color, as orderly as in a department store. “This is the way it should look. Neat. Nothing fallen on the floor. Just as nice as the Walmart across the street.” She speaks literally: there’s a Walmart across the street, and it’s the competition. There are $2.99 shirts there, too.
Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona isn’t alone in the quest to compete with Walmart. Across North America, Goodwills are using bright lighting, brighter color schemes, and professional product placement, as the organization works to upgrade the public’s expectation of what a thrift store should be. As they do, Goodwill is attracting a more economically diverse clientele. “Things started changing for Goodwill around 2000,” Lisa Allen told me. “You started seeing the higher-end cars in the parking lots.”
As it happens, that was the point that things started changing for Bookoff in Japan, too.
The business of buying and selling used in Japan dates back centuries. Organized pawnshop guilds, protected by the government and police, emerged in the seventeenth century. As a protected industry, the pawnshops were profitable. But they had few incentives to invest in customer service, and their reputations suffered. “Back in the day, people didn’t want to sell their things to used-goods dealers,” says Mayumi Hashimoto, the former president and chair of Bookoff’s board and now a senior adviser and director of the company. “People felt ashamed to sell their stuff to used-goods dealers.”
Hashimoto, who’s seventy-eight, is a corporate legend in Japan. She joined the company at age forty-one as a part-time employee. At the time, Bookoff was just a year old, had a single store, and was devoted exclusively to books. For years, she’d been a stay-at-home mom, but her kids were growing up and needing her less. So Hashimoto had a new ambition: “I wanted to make my own money.” As Bookoff expanded into a national chain, Hashimoto rode it to the top, becoming one of the very few women to run a publicly held company in Japan, a country in which women have struggled to advance in the workplace. Hashimoto has stepped back in recent years, but only modestly: she maintains an office in a nearby Bookoff store because, she says, “I like to see what’s going on.”
“What’d you think of used bookstores in 1991, at the time you applied to work at Bookoff?”
“Dirty!” she says definitively, and then laughs. “I’d never go into one.” Hashimoto has a matronly presence, but there’s a steely directness in her manner that reminds anyone of her authority and how she earned it.
“Anything else?”
“Shame. We used to have lots of pawnshops in Japan. Very snobbish outfits. People would go there to get money, and the pawnshops treated you like you needed it. So if you were seen going there, it meant you didn’t have money.”
Over the next twenty-five years, Hashimoto played a key role in expanding Bookoff into the full range of consumer goods. Along the way, Bookoff transformed how Japanese consumers view secondhand. It wasn’t easy. First, Bookoff had to destigmatize the act of selling used stuff. The solution was a slogan that Hashimoto devised: “Please sell to us.” To English-speaking ears, it sounds like a platitude, not a slogan. But in Japan, it turned the table on the “snobbish” pawnshops and launched a revolution in secondhand dignity and politeness. Today, the phrase is posted outside secondhand businesses around Japan, including many of Bookoff’s fiercest competitors.
Second, the company brightened things up. “Used bookstores are typically dark and frequented by men. We needed to change that,” Hashimoto explains. So they turned on the lights, painted the stores in yellows and oranges, and streamlined pricing to a simple formula so that anyone—not just a snobbish bibliophile—could work behind the counter. “We wanted mothers to feel comfortable bringing their children to the shops. We encouraged them to read in them. And we hoped they’d work at them, too.”
The third and perhaps most important revolution was a training program—directed at customers. Used books, Hashimoto explains, were often viewed as dirty. So Bookoff devised a machine that shaved away the stained and bent pages. The result was a good-as-new book that sold for a fraction of the price charged at a new bookstore. As selling to Bookoff became more acceptable, consumers changed their behaviors. “They realized that their things are worth money if they take care of them,” Hashimoto explains. “Eventually we didn’t need the machine anymore. The books they were bringing us were good enough to put on the shelves.”
Stop by any of the three Bookoff shops within walking distance of the corporate headquarters, and the shift is obvious. The shelves are neat and lined with books that could be mistaken as new: paperback spines are uncreased, pages are white, corners unturned. It’s not just books, either. In clothing, there’s no musty “thrift store” smell, and the clothes are displayed by brand, in arrangements reminiscent of what might be found in a Uniqlo or Gap. In sporting goods, the tents and camping equipment look unused, and the displays wouldn’t be out of place in a Dick’s Sporting Goods.
“Before us, people viewed used as waste,” Hashimoto explains. “Bookoff turns it into a product.”
“So Bookoff is a kind of manufacturer. It produces a product.”
Hashimoto nods vigorously. “Yes.”
So far, no American organization has managed to emulate Bookoff and upgrade the manner in which Americans treat their used things. And there’s good reason for that. In the United States (and in Europe), most secondhand goods are donated rather than sold. As a result, most people lack a financial incentive to take care of their things. So instead of seeing the end of an object’s life as an opportunity to extract some last value from it (as people do with their cars), Americans view that object in philanthropic terms. It’ll help the poor; it’ll benefit the environment. For better or worse, both those reasons have proved to be little incentive to take care of stuff. In my experience, the quality of what’s sold at a Bookoff is far superior to that of the stuff donated at an American thrift store. There’s no comparison, really.
That’s unlikely to change soon. The belief that used things should benefit the poor is deeply engrained in the cultures of North America and Europe. Indeed, when it raises prices or opens boutiques, Goodwill often faces backlash from communities, which expect thrift stores to serve as a resource for the local poor.
Meanwhile, for-profit thrift stores like Savers and online marketplaces like OfferUp, Poshmark, and eBay move far less stuff than Goodwill does, and that’s unlikely to change, either. The $0.50 mixing bowls and $2.99 blouses that fill Cathy Zach’s Goodwill store don’t make economic sense to sell online (shipping would exceed the cost of most items) or in a for-profit store. If the donation system didn’t exist, much more would be trashed.
At eight A.M., Cathy pauses in the middle of her Goodwill sales floor. She’s standing next to an endcap filled with new kitchen utensils, like wooden spoons and plastic spatulas. Around the corner are stacks of secondhand pots and pans.
“What’s with all the new stuff?” I ask.
She glances at the line of people outside her store. This really isn’t the time for an in-depth discussion of retailing strategy. But Cathy, famously patient, offers an answer: “They’d buy it at Walmart if we didn’t sell it. Since we can’t sell used shower caps, we sell new, and people can do most of their shopping here.”
“Do you sell much?”
“New is eight or nine percent of our sales.”
The proliferation of new goods at Goodwill isn’t just about convenience and immediate sales. It also upgrades the image of the store in the eyes of consumers. Displays are more orderly, and the dinge associated with some products is evened out by the presence of sanitized packaging. Cathy, with her years of retail experience, obviously appreciates the opportunity to exercise her skills.
Just before opening, she takes one last gaze at her store and walks toward the front doors. It’s not quite a Bookoff, or a Walmart, but it’s a long way from the garage sales, dingy thrift stores, and church basements that still inform so many American imaginations when it comes to secondhand. She unlocks the doors with a buoyant “Good morning. Welcome. Good morning. How are you? Good morning. Good morning. Fifty percent off today. Good morning.”
The first customers dash past her for the items they’ve stashed. I watch to see if somebody heads for the trench coat that hid those two oil paintings, but nobody makes the run. Two minutes later, the first customers arrive at the register: a middle-aged, Spanish-speaking couple whose two carts hold a small dog kennel, a table lamp, a red silk scarf, a new Jiffy-Foil baking pan, several plastic utensils, two children’s backpacks (Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), a new box of cotton balls, and three new shower caps.
As cashiers ring up carts, clothes hangers pile up at the end of the counters. Cathy, in between taking handbags and other collectibles from the display cabinets, gathers them up and hangs them from nearby clothing racks placed just for that purpose. “At the end of the day, we’ll have four or five thousand hangers,” she says.
I think I misheard. “How many?”
“Four or five thousand. We’ll wrap them in sets of tens and put them out for sale. Typically sell around three hundred.” She grabs another bundle from a register. “The world does not need to make any more hangers.”
At nine, one hour after opening, Cathy invites me to follow her into the back office. “Let’s see how we’re doing,” she says. On her computer are the first-hour results: $1,407.11 in total sales spread over seventy paying customers. Of that, $380 was textiles, and $376 was furniture. “Not too shabby,” she says. “Better than I thought.” But even better, from Cathy’s perspective, are the sales numbers starting to be reported from other Goodwill stores in Tucson. At nine A.M., her store is tops, followed by the shop in tony Bear Canyon, with $1,323 in sales. Casa Grande, the most distant outlet, and one that serves a low-income community, was at the bottom of the list, with $73 in sales.
Energized, Cathy returns to the floor. Lots of stuff will move today. Her numbers will look good, the sell-through will be boosted. “The line starts here,” she says to people snaking through the store, directing them to an aisle perpendicular to the busy cash registers. For now, the flood out the front doors equals the flood coming through the donation door.