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Comment by magicnubs | Hacker News Reader

> There's still a high number of items from various in-house brands from Florida department store Bealls (namely Coral Bay, Reel Legends, and Dept 222)

Looking at the chart, it appears these 3 brands were all in the top 4 most commonly sold (or at least available for sale) brands at Goodwill in by 2019, and they've been in the top 10 or so for years. I can't imagine organic amounts of resale from a Florida-only department store chain could account for this. So is Bealls just straight selling their old stock to Goodwill for cheap? Or maybe even giving it away as a write-off (and to reduce cost to store items they don't think they'll ever be able to sell). I wonder how much of Goodwill's stock actually comes from things like this, as opposed to houseful donations.

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Had limited experience of this while doing strategy work for a large UK fasion retailer.

A significant proportion of items from a new range had been returned as faulty. When they investigated they realised a new factory they were using for this range had slipped a huge amount of bad items through the reatilers QA process. They ended up writing down the whole line and donating it to Oxfam/Redcross to be sold in their charity shops, very similar to Goodwill. It was 100,000's of items.

They were already writing the goods down as a loss against their balance sheet and they managed to recoup a small percentage of that loss as a tax deduction for the charity donation.

It didn't happen often, but it wasn't the first time they'd done it

FWIW this is also a relaitvley common practice for administrators when dealing with bankrupt companies. Donating goods they can't sell is often cheaper than storing them or paying for them to be disposed of!

Being wrote off an entire 787 Dreamliner and donated it to the Pima Air And Space museum. It was going to cost to much to fix and have recertified after it went through testing, so they gave the whole thing away.

Possibly the second largest donated item ever, after the aircraft carrier Russia "donated" to India (I think it was in need of $2B worth of repairs...)

The family that started the Patagonia brand donated 1600 mi^2 of land to Chile to form a national park. That's way bigger than a boat(and probably cheaper to maintain too)!

The first 3 flight test aircraft were donated:

ZA001 Went to Nagoya, Japan.

ZA002 Went to Pima Air and Space Museum (as you noted).

ZA003 Went to the Museum of Flight in Seattle.

As for the other three:

ZA004 may still be with Boeing.

ZA005 was scrapped.

ZA006 appears to have been sold to Mexico for a VIP transport.

If you try to return a mattress you bought online this happens too. They'll have a truck from the Salvation Army stop by. Small write off I suppose. I "returned" an Amazon mattress but my wife didn't like it, and because of COVID they just refunded the money and told me I could keep it. I don't know what I'm gonna do with this extra king sized mattress though, guess I'll make a rather luxurious guest bedroom.

I wonder if any of the price increase OP noticed is from liquidation retailers (both brick and mortar and online) buying and reselling a greater fraction of these runs of "faulty" items since that lets them recapture a greater percentage of what would be a loss.

Fun hypothesis: a giant Florida Goodwill moved into an old Bealls in 2019. Bealls may have run a cost-benefit analysis and said "you know what, it's actually cheaper for us to sell all this old merch to Goodwill at a discount than for us to move it to the new store."

https://www.willmeng.com/goodwill-store-moving-to-shopping-c...

>I wonder how much of Goodwill's stock actually comes from things like this, as opposed to houseful donations.

Anecdata. I worked at a goodwill in the early 2000s for community service. A lot of people donate soiled rubbish disguised as clothing that goes to landfill. I would have no doubt that Goodwill has partnerships with department stores...or else they wouldn't have anything to sell.

Most people do not.

Goodwill does alot of deals with retailers for excess inventory and reshopped returns. Target used to use them, for example.

This is what TJ Maxx/Marshalls used to do. The market is pretty diverse for this type of thing. There's a whole industry around it.

There's some (easy) analysis to be done to look at if these brands are coming only from only one or two Goodwill sellers, which could help us better form a theory. I might take a look after work. Even then, I didn't want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole since understanding might (shudder) require me to get off the internet and call someone or something.

I liked the visualizations a lot by the way. Maybe you mentioned in the write-up and I missed it, but what did you use to make them? Checked the skills listed on your CV but didn't see any not-static visualization tools listed

Thank you! I used d3.js, my first love.

I just went to Goodwill last weekend. They seemed to have more “new” items than I remembered. I assume it’s cheap overstock that’s donated vs marked down.

Bealls is based in Florida, it is not Florida-only.

Walk into a goodwill, and your answer will be obvious. Plenty of things are sold packaged and new in goodwill. Usually it's things like homegoods, in my experience.

Yes, stores often sell excess stock to goodwill.

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