Comment by KillahBhyte | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KillahBhyte | Hacker News Reader

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If something ever seems like a popular but illogical set of actions by people, the best way to understand it is to look at the incentives that drive it (thanks Freakonomics).

In this case I'd wager two things. As a kid I had family who worked a receiving center for Goodwill. Fairly affluent part of our town near the beach. I remember two distinct things being odd to me then. The items people would bring would sometimes be questionable as to how they'd be useful to the needy, either from wear or function. The other part was most people wanted and received a receipt for their donation. Cue Mitch Hedburg receipt for a donut routine. I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.

Throwing things away costs money. When my wife and I moved recently we cleaned house. A second trash can was around 150 a year with limited volume. Trips to the landfill are charged by weight differential. Charity donation is free with the added bonus of someone coming to pick it up if the donation is big enough. We both commented at the time that if we were a little less moral we could easily pack the rubbish in with the donations and save a ton of money. So second is probably convenience with some working the system added in.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's something there, but I do have a hard time lining those theories up with my past interactions around the subject.

For example, a long time ago a roommate of mine wanted to get rid of some furniture, so he had a thrift store send a van to pick it up. It had all been pretty severely damaged by his dog. Having previously worked at a thrift store, I was pretty confident that they wouldn't want any of it, and mentioned as much to him, but he was sure they would be able to find a use for it, and so we schlepped it out to the curb.

After the van had left without taking much of any of it, and we were carrying it all around to the alley for the garbage trucks to pick up (which is free in our city, even for furniture), the thing he expressed remorse about wasn't the donation receipt. It was that he thought it was wasteful to throw all this furniture in the trash just because his dog had been chewing on it.

I still have similar conversations with my partner about this. Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item. I lean toward not wanting to make the staff of the thrift store throw out my trash for me. I think it might just be hard to see if that way if you haven't been there. Neither of us cares about donation receipts, which we don't bother to collect, and still live in the same city that will take anything that will physically fit inside a garbage truck for no extra charge.

Tangentially, if you haven't seen one swallow a full-size sofa, put it on your bucket list. It's a fascinating spectacle.

> Her bias is, she wants to hold on to even the slightest glimmer of hope that someone might find a use for an item.

I have this same problem. It's actually taken me a lot of effort over the years to get away from this mindset. Not that I try to be wasteful, it's more of just forcing myself to be realistic about the likelihood of me being able to repurpose a thing. Sure a thing might be useful to someone but unless I'm really interested in the effort required to find them and facilitate the transaction, that thing is just going to sit around. I have finite space available so unless I really want something or really want to make a donation happen it's going in the trash.

I'm finding that I get a lot more utility out of framing it thus: the trash isn't created when I put it in the bin, the trash is created when I buy it in the first place. Once that happens, it's going to get pitched. Could be today, could be in 30 years, but someday it will happen.

Where that pays extra dividends is in limiting the accumulation of clutter. I used to buy electronic gizmos I didn't, strictly speaking, need, at a fairly regular pace. But I was storing up a bunch of crap I'd eventually have to throw away the next time I declutter. And I had a lot of clutter. Reminding myself that every consumer product is future trash helps limit the accumulation of clutter, which, in turn, limits how often I have to feel bad about throwing it away.

That's a good way to frame things which is something I now do a better job with. My clutter problems were/are mostly from old me not thinking in that way.

I can get on board with this, too. Hoarders are kind of the far end of that spectrum and I can see the same closer to home tendencies in my partner as well. She struggles to dispose of clearly broken beyond repair or reuse items.

Difference in perspective down to cultural bias. Living too long in rural southern US has jaded me into looking for selfish intent behind any altruistic curtains.

The big question here is how to minimize transaction costs.

You often have an item which in good condition would be worth e.g. $55, but it's damaged. If you ask someone how much they need to repair it, they say $50. So in a frictionless plane you would make $5.

But in order to pay them, you would have to fill out tax paperwork, and they would have to fill out tax paperwork, and you would have to pay payroll tax, and they would have to pay income tax, and in the end you would pay $60 and they would receive $30. So instead you throw the item away.

Whereas what you should do instead is to just give it to them. They were willing to fix the item for what in practice was $30. If you gave it to them, they would do the labor they valued at $30, or at $25 because they can omit the labor of doing the tax paperwork, and then they have a $55 item instead of the item going into a landfill.

There are also people who might be willing to use the item as-is without repairing it, if it was free.

So the real problem here is that these organizations aren't allowing people to pick through what they're throwing out. Which wouldn't make them any money, but it would be better for the world.

>I was told then when I asked this was an approximate value of their donation and it was used for tax purposes. So one is probably tax write offs.

Anything preventing them from just making up that figure?

An eventual audit that if they hit the anti lottery could cost them more than they could possibly save. Remember that you don't get to just deduct a donation from your taxes you deduct it from your income which lowers your taxes. For example if you ultimately pay about 30% of your income in federal taxes and you lower your income by 1000 you ultimately have reduced your taxes by $300.

Donations 5000 and up require the person you donated to to fill out a tax form for that donation so making up the numbers would require a confederate in the donating org to be willing to risk prison to enrich you.

https://www.amazinggoodwill.com/donating/IRS-guidelines

Also remember that the bottom half of the country pays little federal income tax (because they don't make much of the income in America) and the top 10-20% has MUCH better legal tax avoidance strategies.

It's likely that some portion of middle income individuals could avoid a small dollar figure in taxes by inflating or even fabricating a string of small donations and presumably out of hundreds of millions of people a few do but you would have to make up a LOT of bullshit donations to make much of a difference but before you could actually save much money you would end up sticking out like a sore thumb. Yes Mr IRS auditor I totally donated over 1000 in goods to goodwill on 10 separate occasions over 2021 and I totally deserve the corresponding $3000 deduction!

On net its probably a small issue. At this point we have people making 6 figures + who just don't file tax returns and haven't been addressed.

Bill Clinton famously donated used underwear, tax write-off claim of $2-6 each.

Hilariously there is a motivation to provide low value receipts for estate executors.

"That old bookcase? It was only worth a dollar so I sent it to Goodwill after his death, it wasn't in the will and nobody wanted it".

Now maybe an antique dealer could sell it for $400, meaning maybe the seller might have gotten $100, and now the estate executor is in trouble. But he died and there's three days to get all the stuff out of the apartment and nobody has set up an estate-paid-for storage unit (how long can you afford to store something only worth $100 anyway? If estate/probate process takes a year...) or prepared a deal with an antique dealer to immediately accept (and who's going to drive it over there, I don't have time?) and if its not disposed of in three days the building mgr will hire a very expensive per hour cleaning crew to toss it in the trash (at some expense) and deliver a hefty bill to the estate. And Goodwill gave him a receipt for a dollar so its documented at least. The Goodwill receipt at least proves the executor didn't steal from the estate by hiding the bookcase in her basement and selling it later on ebay for $400. As if she's young enough to know what ebay is.

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