I have an incredibly rich aunt who send me all sorts of her used fancy items like, nice bags and stuff. I used to donate things like this but once I realized the mark up I just started taking this stuff directly to women's/girls youth shelters. I'd rather a juicy track suit go to a diva in need than get re-sold.

Domestic violence shelters often have shops that sell donated items and the money goes directly to support women and children escaping as well as allowing them to shop in the store

Goodwill is selling your Ralph Lauren item for fifty bucks online instead of six bucks in the store because if they sell it for six bucks in the store somebody is going to buy it and flip it for fifty bucks online.

Once at Costco, I saw some people ravaging a pallet of $5 Snuggie-type things. They picked it clean in under a minute. I just watched in bewilderment. 🧦

I don’t get how some people can’t decipher between the trash can and the donations bin. Truly appalling 🤢

I always fear someone's gonna think im a reseller, because I'm a big flashy person, but I'm actually just in love with whimsy and vintage things since I was a kid just like other non-resellers there looking for lil treasures to make their own & bring them joy 😭

everything is a speculative bubble now. people are trying to claim that everything will increase in value with age but it's just resellers hoping that they won't be the last person in a chain of scams

I stopped donating quality stuff to Goodwill when a former employee told me that the workers would take the good sh*t home for themselves.

The GW Ebay bookstore is great though.

I used to buy books from Salvation Army and Goodwill for around .50¢ (paperbacks) to $1 (hardcover); it didn't matter what condition they were in because if they were good enough I could re-buy them in better condition after I finished them because they were so cheap. Now they want $5+ for a tattered paperback when I can get like new versions (even hardcover!) off of eBay all day long for like $4 to $5. I don't know what any of the people I'm buying from are using the money for, but I honestly trust it to do more good than going to some CEOs pocket. 😩

I've started giving my stuff away on the Olio app instead of donating. I've met some really nice people and its nice to have a chat and know where your stuff is going. I feel like it's such a good app for reviving a little bit of that community spirit we seem to have lost.

Just you saying "all she talked about was milking cows" with a straight face was worth clicking on this video.

You have a point about toxic nostalgia 🧦 The lack of optimism in our current time has led people to glamorize and try to revive the feeling of the past by commodifying mundane, borderline useless items like dried up pens and toys. It’s sad that people resort to gambling on reselling dried up pens for $30 as a side hustle. I never valued the act of collecting. I tried having a sticker collection once and I found it overwhelming to have 100 stickers in a pile. Why was I holding onto a stupid amount of stickers? They all didn’t bring me joy. I would forget I had them most days. I could’ve taken a photo of each of them and I would’ve had the same amount of joy from them. It made me feel like I was clinging to images I liked. Clinging never feels good to me so I stopped looking for new stickers.

I'm a home canner and I prefer getting jars secondhand, but some stores price then higher per jar than they are new! My Goodwill, surprisingly, tends to actually sell them for 50-99 cents each most of the time though. I'll still buy the more expensive ones if they're all I can find just because we're running out of sand to make glass and I want to use as little new glass as possible but it's so frustrating

I once tried to get a duvet cover at a sale and this woman aggressively pushed in front of me and scooped up ALL of the duvet covers - 10 of them, exact same design and pattern - not leaving even one for me. Why did she need 10 duvet covers?! I was so shocked that I was frozen on the spot for about 30 seconds while she walks away with this tower of duvet covers to the register. I was left wondering if she had 10 beds or she was reselling them.

I only wanted one! 😭

My mum and I left immediately afterwards because we hated the environment of the sale. (This was a Black Friday like sale, our first and last time participating.) Too many people, too aggressive, too loud. It was a nightmare. I've never seen people so bizarrely pushy and greedy and frantic. Scary. And I didn't even get my duvet cover. Never again.

I'm still wondering why she bought 10 identical duvet covers.

You're so right. Scalpers wouldn't need to do what they do if better jobs were more easily accessible, but it does say something that a lot of the things being resold tend to be nostalgia-related (such as Pokemon cards). The proliferation of resellers would make one think that means someone out there is buying.

People use nostalgia as a coping mechanism, a comfort when things are difficult. That even young people are so interested in nostalgia items they weren't even alive to experience should be alarming to everyone. These are not good times right now and this is just another symptom pointing that out to anyone willing to think about it.

3:35 I'm so glad you asked! I know this ain't actually very helpful but the best answer for where to donate is going to be the places local to you- ideally not a chain of any kind.

There are plenty of small thrift shops run by churches or other non-profits that will tell you specifically where a portion of the profits go to. (In my neighborhood there's a shop that is 100% volunteer run and puts 100% of the profits to charity)

You can also sometimes donate items like clothes or linens directly to churches or shelters (even worn out linens can be donated to animal shelters).

And at the very least I have found that the smaller the thrift shop- the better the prices, even if they don't use any money to a charity it feels good to at least donate to somewhere where they will resell things at an affordable price.

I don’t see resellers who buy full pallets of Pokemon cards (or any item en masse) as people who are just working a side hustle to get by. Stocking up on anything like that takes money that a lot of people don’t have. Those resellers (not to be confused with people who pick up items onesie-twosie at the thrift shop) treat it more like gambling or playing the stock market, like a get-rich-quick strategy. A lot of the online creators who are pushing this sort of mass buying of “collectibles,” like Logan Paul, are the same guys who were pushing NFTs five years ago.

I feel it is a sign of the times. The economy is so bad, people have to flip items to survive.

Everything is so beige now. The 90s are desired because it used color.

We live in the remnants of a once great society. Picking through the rubble for scraps that we can sell for dinner.