Goodwill Clearance Center?

[phreakindee]

Anyone ever heard of this offshoot of Goodwill, called the Goodwill Clearance Center? There's one now right behind the "Super" Goodwill where I am, near Asheville NC (it's like a Goodwill Wal-Mart, it's huge)

Essentially, it's where the last 30 years go to die. It's a large warehouse basically, where all the crap from all the local Goodwills gets dumped that nobody wants or was too overpriced to sell. Every hour or so employees roll out these huge mountains of stuff on carts the size of ping-pong tables, about 6 at a time. There's usually a mad dash of people to go and grab whatever you can - it's all $1/pound, whatever it is. It's pretty strange.

Large items are put in another pile, usually TVs, monitors, stereos, etc, for $3-10 each.

Today was my first visit, and I grabbed a pile of stuff before it got snapped up and/or crushed - who knows happens to this stuff if nobody gets it at the end of the day.

*Apple ADB mice (trapezoid-style, and later rounded)

*USB Keyboard (new Saitek Eclipse)

*Serial mice for IBM/Tandy PCs

*Sega Saturn

*Nintendo 64

*NES Joystick

*Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32

All for $16. All working.

I mean, there's so much crap though... like hair driers from the 60's, old encyclopedias, hi-8 cameras, TVs/monitors/radios, tons of toys and stuffed animals, TONS of clothing (which is thankfully separated into another area of the warehouse), baseball card collections. Anyways, didn't know if anyone else had any experiences with these places.

 

[tyrannis]

I have never seen a Clearance Center. They operate "Clothing Stores" and stores called "ComputerWorks" around here, but there may be a large repository of donated items that isn't open to the public.

 

[II2II]

The local Goodwill used to have the main store (standard botique setup, albeit larger), something called "Buy the Pound" (which sounds like your clearance centre), and an electronics graveyard in the basement. The electronics graveyard was great because they had tonnes of stuff at Salvation Army type prices (i.e. the prices were usually sane). Buy the pound was always great for books. They usually had stuff that reflected my interests, and it was dirt cheap.

Ever since that place disappeared, I stopped shopping at Goodwill. The Salvation Army has far better prices, far better choice (even in small stores), and far friendlier staff.

 

[zerotypeq]

Man thats a sweet deal, I'd love to get a saturn at that price haha.

 

[Mike Richardson]

I have never seen a Clearance Center. They operate "Clothing Stores" and stores called "ComputerWorks" around here, but there may be a large repository of donated items that isn't open to the public.

Goodwill has a clearance center in Houston off Beltway 8 and Hammerly, which is also their central warehouse. The items are priced very cheap, but items are not sold by weight. The store is also fairly small.

For general small items, there are about a dozen ping pong sized tables with plastic bins on them full of the items. Every so often, they clear all the bins off the oldest table (all of the remaining items are thrown away) and put out new bins. Only when all of the bins are placed on the table, may you begin digging through the bins.

This is where I got the VCR that ate tapes ($2), and a full boxed copy of Mac OS 9 (25¢). I think the OS 9 was from before they started ComputerWorks though.

For clothes, they have several tables where they just heap on the clothes. Women stand around the table and dig through the mass of cloth, filling up their shopping carts, which are all invariably stolen from other stores. They will let clothes sit out all day before they pick up all of the remains and either send them to a 3rd world country or shred them up.

Before ComputerWorks, they used to hold computer auctions at this location. Now the computers are crushed.

 

[phreakindee]

I have never seen a Clearance Center. They operate "Clothing Stores" and stores called "ComputerWorks" around here, but there may be a large repository of donated items that isn't open to the public.

Goodwill has a clearance center in Houston off Beltway 8 and Hammerly, which is also their central warehouse. The items are priced very cheap, but items are not sold by weight. The store is also fairly small.

For general small items, there are about a dozen ping pong sized tables with plastic bins on them full of the items. Every so often, they clear all the bins off the oldest table (all of the remaining items are thrown away) and put out new bins. Only when all of the bins are placed on the table, may you begin digging through the bins.

This is where I got the VCR that ate tapes ($2), and a full boxed copy of Mac OS 9 (25¢). I think the OS 9 was from before they started ComputerWorks though.

For clothes, they have several tables where they just heap on the clothes. Women stand around the table and dig through the mass of cloth, filling up their shopping carts, which are all invariably stolen from other stores. They will let clothes sit out all day before they pick up all of the remains and either send them to a 3rd world country or shred them up.

Before ComputerWorks, they used to hold computer auctions at this location. Now the computers are crushed.

I am really hoping that the Goodwills around here don't get that bad anytime soon... I live not too far from their headquarters in South Carolina, so I would think they would have by now, but maybe it's just a regional thing. Evil with computers it seems. They just strip the hard drives here and that's about it. Geez.

 

[Gil]

I talked to a lady at my local Goodwill today...She said unless the computer is brand new, the hard drive is taken out, the parts are stripped and sold off...So there's really zero chance (for me anyway) of finding an old Mac at Goodwill. :-/

Well at least they're not all crushed.

 

[Unknown_K]

I have never seen an actual computer at the Goodwill here in Ohio, just keyboards, printers, scanners, monitors, and some cards.

 

[Mike Richardson]

Most thrift stores for some reason have this aversion to computers.

Goodwill, while not serving our particular interests well (crushing old Macs), is actually the only store I've seen to come up with a good outlet for computer goods in the form of ComputerWorks.

I would love to work with some place like Salvation Army or Value Village and set up competition to Goodwill ComputerWorks. I would have the same store in the front, and a recycling deal with another place, but I would also have an eBay outfit where we sold vintage computing products to raise additional funds.

Even if some Macs had to be crushed, I know what parts to take out of them to sell on the eBay store to raise even more money. You can take a Comm Slot II card out of a 5400 that has to be crushed and sell that card for $8, instead of getting 10¢ for the scrap value. You can take working old SCSI drives, wipe them, and resell them to people who need such things. There's all kinds of stuff you can do even if you have to crush the main computer.

 

[JRL]

The Goodwill here rarely sells computers.

However, one time I went there, they had tons and tons of them. Two Sun Ultra 5s, ~15 PCs, and ~5 laptops (including a heavily upgraded PowerBook 170 w/1 GB hard drive and 8 MB of RAM that I snagged), etc.

In my case, they probably kept them in storage or something and decided to put them for sale all at once.

 

[II2II]

Most thrift stores for some reason have this aversion to computers.

While it is disappointing, I can understand why thrift stores don't want to sell computer gear.

I recently walked into a Salvation Army. They had 3 computers (one of which was tempting), and approximately 20 CRT monitors (again, one of which was tempting). The former, unfortunately, are hard to sell. Even if I wasn't making a big move in the near future, I would have to put as much serious consideration into buying a $5 computer as a $5000 computer -- just because it is too easy to acquire too much. As for the monitors, those are just toxic waste.

Then there are other complications, ranging from staff who don't know what the stuff is to donors who don't know how to maintain their privacy.

It's too bad, but I totally understand their anti-computer dontation attitude.

 

[phreakindee]

Most thrift stores for some reason have this aversion to computers.

While it is disappointing, I can understand why thrift stores don't want to sell computer gear.

I recently walked into a Salvation Army. They had 3 computers (one of which was tempting), and approximately 20 CRT monitors (again, one of which was tempting). The former, unfortunately, are hard to sell. Even if I wasn't making a big move in the near future, I would have to put as much serious consideration into buying a $5 computer as a $5000 computer -- just because it is too easy to acquire too much. As for the monitors, those are just toxic waste.

Then there are other complications, ranging from staff who don't know what the stuff is to donors who don't know how to maintain their privacy.

It's too bad, but I totally understand their anti-computer dontation attitude.

I can understand the space and hard to sell part, especially regarding old computers - once they're older than 5 years at most they are regarded as useless to most.

The privacy thing is always blown out of proportion. Like the Goodwills here, just take out or erase the drive and off you go. Found several early 90s machines without a HDD.

Still, common sense should be used. I just got a Performa 6400 at a pawn shop... And wow. There were about 30 floppies, all filled with personal data, about the most I have seen in a conquest. Taxes, IRA data, business data, family history/stories, two disks labeled "memoirs"... Pretty bad. It's a good thing I'm not the type to take advantage of that, it's all you need to become this person really.