| rev:text
| - While on an excursion to a thrift shop in White Oak, we passed by the big 'Goodwill' sign a few miles before. I'd never been to this area, so we decided to stop back on the way back from the intended goal.
What we were about to walk into was a surreal Rod Serling Twilight Zone moment.
We walked through the front door into a giant warehouse full of large blue flatbed bins. As we began to walk toward the bins to look, a guy barked at us to step to the front of the store. it was time to 'change the bins'. Huh? I'd never seen a Goodwill like this, and didn't know what the heck was going on.
Then we noticed the crowd of shoppers all crammed along the wall of the front of the store with their shopping carts, kind of looking like a ragged group of shopping game show contestants. So we walked along the drooling crowd in the front of the store, and watched as a team of Goodwill workers rolled out the maybe 50 long blue flatbed bins through the garage door in the back of this ginormous space to the back warehouse, which looked equally ginormous. A few people started to wander, and another guy barked 'You need to stay behind the blue line'. And again, never having been there, we looked down, and indeed, there was a faint blue line marking off about 20 feet of the front of the store, and most of the game show contestants were behind it.
There wasn't much signage explaining any of these rules, only a couple of signs explaining the pricing system. Apparently, they sell most of their 'stuff' by the pound, except for a small collection of 'bigger ticket' items, which are priced individually, like TVs, furniture, etc. We did see a remarkable player piano there for only $20 which I would have been tempted to grab had I had a) a vehicle AND crew to get it home; and b) if I didn't already HAVE an old upright piano that will need to be moved to my next home.
Then, the Goodwill team of workers began rolling IN the newly loaded blue bins. And what they were rolling in truly looked like they had simply taken donation boxes and dumped them into the bins. There was no logic, reason or pattern to it. They just looked like huge bins of garbage that was slightly too good to throw away. Clothes, kitchen gadgets, toys, antiquated electronics, VHS tapes, logo bags of all sorts...just mixed and dumped.
As the bins began to roll into place, a few people made bold moves to peek into them, and were once again shunned into place behind the 'blue line'. Then after maybe twenty bins were in place, a man stepped to the back edge of the bins that had been put into place, stretched out his arms like a referee, and yelled 'You may now shop up to THIS point.
It took my friend and I less than one minute to make a hasty decision to get the hell OUT of there!
That swarm of ragged game show contestants and their shopping carts attacked those twenty bins with a speed and fury that brought to mind the YouTube videos of the Walmart holiday fistfights over coveted cheap plastics. Grabbing, blocking with their shopping carts...base human insanity over...trash.
Instead of calling it an 'Outlet Store', they really need to call it 'The Last Stop Before The Dump'. It truly looks more like they've gathered all of the donated crap that never sold from all of the local Goodwill regular 'stores', and are giving it one last shot at being grabbed.
Apparently they change these bins every two hours, and we just happened to get there right at the changing of the garbage...errr...I mean 'guard'.
And as soon as that crowd started moving, we literally were a little too scared to stay in the middle of them, and headed right out the door.
And it really is a shame. They have a huge space, and if they just put the stuff out in the usual 'organized' and 'displayed' manner that regular stores do, they might have a more 'in control' clientele, and actually make a few more 'sales' to people who might actually be looking FOR something, instead of just doing a mad dash and grab.
But I will be avoiding that kind of madness. I'll stick to my regular haunts, or places like them.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)