I Can’t Get My Fill of the New Goodwill

We can gain so much from our intimate partners. One important thing I learned from my late wife of 43 years, Simone, was thrifting. Our family, upper-middle-class New Yorkers, would throw away perfectly good food the same day if it hadn’t been cooked or eaten. Simone, a refugee teenager in Munich, Bavaria, from the erstwhile German province of East Prussia in 1945 learned to find ways to survive on very little. So, from a childhood where I only needed to ask for something to get it new, I learned from her to buy everything except underclothes and an occasional pair of shoes from resale shops or the occasional neighborhood garage sale. So yesterday I started my hunt for a new pair of green, brown, or tan corduroy pants at our spiffy new Goodwill. Boulder, Colorado’s old Goodwill, in a less central part of town, had recently moved into the former Bed, Bath, and Beyond facility in an upscale strip mall next to the big REI store on our main shopping street. The new place was well decorated, sections were carefully placed and indicated, and the whole operation felt on a par with the nearby Marshall’s. (To be sure, the well-prepared items were now pricier than they had been, but bargains still abounded.)...

I love the concept of Goodwill. The Chat GPT 4-based Bing search engine reveals these facts about the organization. It was founded in Boston in 1902 by a Methodist minister named the Reverend Edgar J. Helms. His idea was to collect used clothing and household goods from wealthy families and then train poor people to clean and repair them. Once the items were ready, they were either sold to the needy or given to the individuals who prepared them. As Bing goes on to say, “The system worked, and the goodwill philosophy of ‘a hand up, not a handout” was born.” Today there are some 3,300 Goodwill stores and collection centers throughout the U.S. and Canada, with a sales force of 300,000. Boulder’s new store displays large posters showing individual trainee-employees with captions telling things like “So-and-so was a runaway from home. Now she works for us and is getting a college education.” In short, saving people and recycling things is what Goodwill does. It’s a wonderful mission. I’m not a big fan of capitalism. I like to say, “I’m right-handed but left-wing.” As a Christian I believe that we, individually and collectively, are bound not to harm but to help and further the lives of our neighbors and that everyone is our neighbor.
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Anyway, yesterday, as mentioned above, I had the urge to go shopping for pants. My first stop was the new Goodwill. Alas, they didn’t have what I was looking for, but I did buy a wonderful pair of leather winter boots (My old ones, nearly 20 years old, were peeling.), a great knitted hoody, and two pair of new wool socks on the temptation shelf by the checkout. You can see the first two items below. And as a consolation prize, I found a suitably colored, inexpensive pair of winter pants at the nearby Marshall’s. All in all, it was—yuck, yuck!—a good day for Goodwill hunting.

Ta tah! Here are the main take-aways from my adventure yesterday at our new Goodwill.