All Thrift Stores are Fronts for Reselling Business

I'm in Los Angeles County and frequent thrift shops. It is a bleak desert compared to other parts of the US.

Let me give a typical example. I've donated tons of items that should be welcome on the shelves of this particular Goodwill. Yet when I revisit the store day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, none of those items appear on shelves. Many items that should be good sellers. Most likely this store/"donation center" is simply a collection operation where donations are sifted for items that can be sold for profit online then the rest is sold by the pallet-load. Like buying mining tailings. All the value has been extracted.

One day at a Salvation Army store, I walked in the donation entrance. There, on the floor was a pallet full of books. The books were still in the boxes and bags they'd been donated in. I'd never seen this before at this store. I figured if it's on the sales floor, it must be for sale. So I started digging into the gaylord box. I started finding the kind of books I had never, in years shopping this store, seen on the shelves of this store. My digging started to garner some looks of concern from store staff. But no one ran over to tell me this box was not yet ready for sale. Probably because that would expose the true nature of their how this and almost all thrift stores operate. They never put uninspected lots of donated onto the sales floor until they have been sifted through for anything saleable for profit first. What is really telling is that I keep watch of the book section of this store and it barely changes over weeks and months. Seems like if they are receiving that many books (and I almost always see gaylords full to the brim with books of a quality I never see on their shelves) the inventory on the shelves would be changing out. But they are not. Again same story. Donations are stripped of all value and the rest are sold by the pallet to the suckers that think they'll find some value. Most of that crap I see at yard sales and swap meets with the buyers trying just to break even from their mistaken purchase.

Most "thrift stores" are just fronts for suckering people into donating items they have no idea the value of (otherwise they would sell them online themselves) to "thrift stores" which, if they were not involved in massive out of store (online) selling, couldn't come close to keeping the lights on and the rent paid on their stores. Not even close.

This is a word to the wise to anyone with hopes on making a living off thrifting from thrift stores, especially in a metropolitan area like Los Angeles County. Don't quit your day job.