24 Mar
2005
24 Mar
'05
2:50 p.m.
Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
Goodwill makes money by selling volume. The more they sell the better.
The product is free, the cost is lights, heat, ac, labor, trash
disposal, etc. They're all pretty much fixed, unless donations
skyrocket. Labor may change a bit, if the outgoing product is changed
I don't want to speak for Goodwill, and this
thread is pretty much a
nuisance by now, but this is naive and unrealistic. You're right that
"almost all of it should sell", but there's only so much shelf space,
there's only so much time you're willing to have crap cluttering your
shelves, and there's only so much profit (or none at all, or even a loss)
in the prices it would take to sell most of the PC crap that comes through
the door. Goodwill stores are not setup to sell used commodity PC dreck.
How can any loss from selling something cheap, be more expensive than
tossing it? If it's tossed, there is zero money coming in, and the
trash load is higher.
Goodwill sells commodity PC stuff all the time, locally. If it's cheap
enough, it will sell.....thats not naive and unrealistic.
Shelf space could be a problem, but that will vary greatly store by store.
error in the
price it should be on the low side, not the high side,
because the goal is too sell it, not have sit, and the only cost that
needs to be covered is the handling cost.
Retail sales is more complicated than this. from trash to sales.
So using a price guide to identify specific computers
that already has a
suggested price range to choose from is too complicated, but sending out a
"summary sheet" to all the stores that asks the same employees you just
finished saying aren't capable of utilizing a price guide to apply totally
subjective rules to select and price computers is not?
I don't believe the majority of Goodwill employees have the interest,
knowledge, patience, or time to go looking in a book for every computer
that goes through Goodwill, only to find out that it's only worth $10,
or it's not in the book, or to have it priced at $150, but only worth
$15 because they mis-identify it, and they have to get a rack of jeans
out on the sales floor. A sheet of guide lines can tell them, the
monitors a small one, it's clean, and it says Trinitron, $15... bam
they're done, next item. Let's see, it says Mac, the screen is part of
it, it's pretty dirty, $10, bam done, next item.
Chad Fernandez
Michigan, USA