Day 177

The other day while detoured for a traffic accident, I drove past this store.

Wait…what?  The Goodwill Outlet–OUTLET?   That’s like visiting the department of redundancy department. Of course, I had to investigate. I mean this is valuable research, right?

The hours of operation were posted on the side of the building, so I wandered in one afternoon.    The store was silent and completely empty, no customers, no employees, eerie.

No matter, I spent some uninterrupted time poking around and figured I would go find the errant cashier if I wanted to buy something.  Only later did it occur to me that all the employees could have met with foul play and been stuffed behind the cash register.

Fortunately that was not the case.  Because, I could finally hear the echo of distant voices and I still couldn’t quite figure out how the outlet worked.  I decided to seek help since the tags were all standard Goodwill issue.  Through the back doors, I entered a  warehouse literally floor to the ceiling with giant overflowing cardboard bins.  A woman looked up at me and said, “Oh, ma’am, we aren’t open.”

Confused, I sort of babbled, “oh, but the sign…isn’t today Tuesday? “   She said, “Oh, we changed our hours,” and gestured to an 8 ½ x 11  photocopy taped under the no longer valid foot tall numbers painted on the side of the building.

Right, how could I have not seen that?  And why didn’t you have the door locked? Don’t you know you could have been killed and crammed under the counter?  Of course, these were things I just said in my head.

In any case, we had a nice chat. I asked her about the Outlet designation.  She explained that all of the local Goodwill stores shipped their stock that hadn’t sold to her central location and then she put it out at reduced rates.  I don’t know exactly what it says about our consumption when our second hand stores need somewhere to send their overstock, a concept I had never considered before.

She went on to tell me to ignore the price tags, all clothes were a dollar, toys fifty cents to a dollar, glassware a quarter.  See that rack?  She gestured to a rack of formal wear, those are all three dollars.  She added, sometimes you can get wedding dresses for five dollars.

She also said, “this is a great place for people on a REALLY tight budget.”  I would have to agree with her, although it seemed to me that it was pretty typical Goodwill stock.  I did a search and found this list of Goodwill Outlet Stores across the US and Canada.  Although, the list doesn’t seem to be comprehensive since mine isn’t included.   If you don’t see one in your area, it might be worth a bit more research, particularly if you are in need of a wedding dress.