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Comment by sverige | Hacker News Reader

The Salvation Army is similarly exploitive. I knew a manager of one of their facilities and had a tour that was (probably unintentionally) eye-opening. For example, he talked about how any clothes they didn't sell in a certain amount of time were sent to their "ragging operation," made into bales, and then shipped to Africa.

The only difference from Goodwill as described here is that the population being exploited are addicts and ex-cons rather than mostly disabled folks. I want to like these organizations, I even think they started out with the right intentions, but greed takes over and ruins them.

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I'm not sure that ragging operation in and of itself is a bad thing. If the clothes aren't useful, that seems to be the next phase of life for textile.

I've done some work with smaller charitable orgs sorting through donations and the policy was essentially that if it wasn't at minimum something you'd wear to a job interview at a fast food restaurant (think clean jeans/polo shirts) then it went in the trash. Sadly this was the vast majority of donations as people tended to use the donations as a dumping ground for things they couldn't throw out themselves vs giving items that would actually help people down on their luck.

Genuinely curious, regarding this as well as the complaint in the article -- what should these stores do with the clothes that don't sell? It sounds like shipping them overseas is bad and throwing them away is bad.

I'd assume there are large amounts clothes that don't end up selling and the only thing I know what to do with clothes I don't want anymore is donate them to Goodwill!

I turn plenty of my own old tshirts into rags for use at home. Better than buying a package of specially-made rags IMHO.

I'm not certain what's changed over the years but I used to love going into Salvation Army or Goodwill and browsing their stuff because you never knew what cool thing you might find. Nowadays, they all seem to carry the same picked-over stuff.

I think part of it may be that they have also noticed the cool items and moved them to an online marketplace where they can get more cash for them.

I wouldn't be surprised if were just a user trend of ignoring Salvation Army and taking the quick buck from Craig's List/Letgo.

With the rise of the Internet and ecommerce, there's now hoards of people buying all the good stuff to resell on Amazon, eBay, Craigslist, Facebook, etc. Many professional resellers go to charity shops daily.

US/Canada/Europe own/use/throw away far to many clothes. There arent enough poor people locally to consume them all as second hand. So it is either overseas in shipping containers or into landfills.

What are they supposed to do, just let clothes pile up forever when they don't sell? They only have so much space to display clothes, and if there are more donations than things people want to buy, they have to do something with the excess. If you don't like it, go the the Salvation Army and buy something.

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