I don't know why you would donate to a for profit thrift store like Value Village.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/state-ag-sues-v...
The owner has a giant estate on Mercer Island near Seattle that's second only to Paul Allen's.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/retail/state-ag-sues-v...
The owner has a giant estate on Mercer Island near Seattle that's second only to Paul Allen's.
At least with Value Village I can see that people are being helped. f I donate elsewhere the benefits are difficult (if not impossible) to see.
To that end, I also donate items to the Salvation Army who also makes a visible positive impact on lives and communities. They operate on a non-profit basis.
Sending me home with half a trunk still full of stuff that VV is happy to accept doesn't encourage bothering to go to the Goodwill. I just want to drop my old stuff, easily, at one location reasonably near my house, where it won't completely exit the value chain like it would in a landfill.
And Goodwill is even worse to its employees. Many of their workers are paid well under minimum wage, under the FLSA exemption for disabled workers. Their CEO makes over $400k though.. (The Salvation Army is quite good on a costs ratio, but has political positions I can't support.)
Take for instance the Red Cross and Haiti as one of the most visible recent examples. They received half a billion dollars and achieved next to nothing. 25% [1] of that half billion was spent on "internal expenses." And they have very little clue or accounting of how the remaining money was even spent. Most of it was not even directly spent but instead donated to other nonprofits, who in turn took their cuts, and accountability quickly breaks down. According to that reporting from NPR, the "ambitious plan to build housing resulted in just six permanent homes" from that half a billion dollars.
That sort of waste and lack of any accountability is something that would rarely fly in any for profit business. Would that money in Haiti have been better spent by entrepreneurs looking to create housing/food and other necessities with open intentions of profiting in the long run? Maybe not a fair question since they'd have had to have tried hard to spend it worse, but that's the whole point. Aligning a good service with a good profit is, in my opinion, the true soul of capitalism. It's just such a shame that today it's often easier to make more money in less than ethical ways.
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2016/06/16/482020436/senators-report-fin...
You can just do more good with the same amount of effort by finding distributors who aren't pocketing the bulk of the benefit. It is a small thing, and maybe not worth it to you; my general outlook here is that if it is worth the effort for me to take old stuff somewhere vs. tossing it, it is worth 10 more minutes to find the address of the local Quaker outreach, vets assistance group or some other honest nonprofit.