There was a change with the Goodwill in the US at some point as well. You can find monitors, keyboards, mice, cables, etc there now but no actual computers. They started funnelling those to shopgoodwill.com I think. As an aside, right now shopgoodwill.com has four 23" Cinema Displays on offer for about $30 each (not including shipping). But shopgoodwill.com is an auction site so you have to wait for the auction to end.
Curious how they didn’t run with “bidgoodwill.com” instead.
It's almost like the Goodwill employees started waking up to the value of the items being donated. Combine this with middle class people all of a sudden starting to realize that Goodwill existed and that it had decent items for a decent price and suddenly it became hard to find stuff there. My wife has real silver platters and serving trays that she got for pennies during the time period before Goodwill started identifying quality items. And I once walked out with an HP postscript laser printer for about $10. Not now.
The organization, even as a not-for-profit, still has to focus on bringing in enough revenue to cover not only the basics, like higher rents for their store locations (which, indeed, have gone way up, even for them) and the paying of staff, but also their core mandate of new skills training for people and also other areas of community outreach.
Couple that with a post-NAFTA-era acceleration of consuming “durable goods” products with ever-faster turnover, quietly fostering a culture shift from people being recognized not for what they do in life, but for what they consume (and how they convey that consumption). What happens is a glut in obsolete(d) durable goods shows up in secondhand stores, en masse, by folks who were at least thoughtful and wise enough not to throw them, reckless, into their rubbish bin for weekly pick-up.
And for a nation-state the (population and consumption-per-capita) size of the U.S., that’s a
lot of material to end up in thrifting/yard sale/marketplace outlets. (Real talk: I do sort of envy the sheer quantity of stuff one can procure fairly easily via thrifting in the U.S.) Goodwill there at least had the foresight to set up an online bidding site for their higher-demand durable goods products. Hopefully that revenue is helping improve their community-based programmes.
There used to be a Salvation Army store we visited, but it closed a long time ago. The only other one I know of was in Scottsdale and we dropped in back in 2003. No idea if it's still there. I did get a PowerMac 6500 from that store though for $65 and it was a great Mac.
@bunnspecial has that Mac now.
Given its very long, steady
track record on condemning — and equivocations around —
an entire portion of the general population under dubious auspices, this is why Sally Ann is typically, always, a big non-starter for me. I’m trying not to veer
too headlong into off-topic grounds here, but more just laying out why thrifting here has gotten tougher with the bankruptcy shutdown of our regional Goodwill division.
That said, I have managed to find a couple of interesting Mac items for cheap at Value Village (like a ratty 12-inch iBook G4 whose display was harvested for my clamshell iBook XGA mod), but most of those I’ve seen were found immediately following the months-long closure of shops during pandemic lock-down.
For example, on the first day they re-opened, I visited a location to find a B&W G3 (probably Rev A or B, based on the specs), three 13-inch unibody Macs (one was a MB, the others were MBPs, but early ones from 2009–10), and
three different A1047s — none of which was a step up from the mid-2004 DP2.0 I own (one did, however, have the Radeon 9600 card, which was one feature in its favour). Since then, there have been only periodic appearances of Macs, and those tend to get snapped up quickly.
This
is Canada though: there are, quantitatively, fewer of these items in existence or in circulation here, as Apple’s reach here used to lag the U.S. by several years.
But yeah, SA tends to be way more expensive.
Huh. I did not know this!
