As a lifetime fan of Venn diagrams, I enjoy when parts of my life overlap. Earlier this year my wife and I rented a booth in a local toy mall where we have been selling retro and vintage toys. A lot of the initial stock came from my own personal collection, but I only have a finite number of things to sell and so some of the newer things have come from thrift stores, estate sales, and garage sales. Completely unrelated to that, a few weeks ago a family friend accidentally donated the wrong stack of items to Goodwill which has had us running all over town and checking various stores in an attempt to recover those items. (You’ll hear more about that incident in the video.) Between those two things my wife and I have been spending a lot of time in secondhand stores (especially Goodwill!), and when I’m there I always take a moment to take off those hats and put on my vanlife hat in hopes of finding inexpensive items to add to my van’s inventory.
In this week’s video you’ll see a few clips I shot at our local Goodwill Outlet Center. As I mention in the video, this is where things go to die. At the Goodwill Outlet Center, everything is sorted into large rolling carts and sold by the pound. According to their website, last year Goodwill received roughly 5.7 billion (with a “b”) pounds of donations. All that stuff has to go somewhere and so what doesn’t sell in stores ends up here. During our visit there were at least 100 bins on the floor, each one 4′ by 8′ and 2′ deep and full of “stuff.” Bins stay on the floor for approximately two hours before they are wheeled off and replaced with new ones. This happens all day every day and the amount of items that pass through that building is staggering. While there you can’t help but to see that place as a metaphor for consumerism. Goodwill does a good job of not sending things to landfills, but when items leave the outlet center, they are never the same. From here, pages are torn out of books to be recycled, electronics are either recycled or used in electronic repair classes, and clothes are either sold in bulk to other countries or turned into wiping rags. If you want to see a longer video of our day at the Goodwill Outlet Center, check this ous:
Back to this week’s BRV video. The items I share in my latest video did not come from the outlet center, but normal Goodwill stores. Some of the items, like the electric kettle, are ones that someone owned and either replaced or no longer had a use for. Others, like the USB rechargeable lantern I found, were probably gifts that sat unopened in someone’s closet or garage for a year or two before being donated.
Most Goodwill stores have electrical outlets where you can test electronics before leaving the store, and some (all?) stores offer a 7-day warranty period for electronics (I’m not sure if that only applies to items that are sold new-in-box or not). Either way, I rarely test items or return them. I probably should, but mentally I write them off as a donation toward Goodwill’s cause. For the record I have no particular affinity toward Goodwill or their cause and am not vouching for what they do or where the money goes; they’re just the most popular chain of thrift stores in my area and so that’s where we tend to go.
The park you’ll see toward the end of the video is the Route 66 Park, located on… you guessed it. To the east of the park is the lake I occasionally hang out at (and where the majority of today’s video was shot) and directly to the west is the Route 66 Skate Park. It’s a cool little area that offers a lot of things to do for free. We used to take our kids to the playground at the park when they were young, and there’s a great walking trail that goes all around the area.
