
A graphical analysis of women's tops sold on Goodwill's website - jjmccoolguy
https://goodwill.awardwinninghuman.com/
======
magicnubs
> There's still a high number of items from various in-house brands from
> Florida department store Bealls (namely Coral Bay, Reel Legends, and Dept
> 222)

Looking at the chart, it appears these 3 brands were all in the top 4 most
commonly sold (or at least available for sale) brands at Goodwill in by 2019,
and they've been in the top 10 or so for years. I can't imagine organic
amounts of resale from a Florida-only department store chain could account for
this. So is Bealls just straight selling their old stock to Goodwill for
cheap? Or maybe even giving it away as a write-off (and to reduce cost to
store items they don't think they'll ever be able to sell). I wonder how much
of Goodwill's stock actually comes from things like this, as opposed to
houseful donations.

~~~
Joe8Bit
Had limited experience of this while doing strategy work for a large UK fasion
retailer.

A significant proportion of items from a new range had been returned as
faulty. When they investigated they realised a new factory they were using for
this range had slipped a huge amount of bad items through the reatilers QA
process. They ended up writing down the whole line and donating it to
Oxfam/Redcross to be sold in their charity shops, very similar to Goodwill. It
was 100,000's of items.

They were already writing the goods down as a loss against their balance sheet
and they managed to recoup a _small percentage_ of that loss as a tax
deduction for the charity donation.

It didn't happen often, but it wasn't the first time they'd done it

~~~
Joe8Bit
FWIW this is also a relaitvley common practice for administrators when dealing
with bankrupt companies. Donating goods they can't sell is often cheaper than
storing them or paying for them to be disposed of!

~~~
lozaning
Being wrote off an entire 787 Dreamliner and donated it to the Pima Air And
Space museum. It was going to cost to much to fix and have recertified after
it went through testing, so they gave the whole thing away.

~~~
frandroid
Possibly the second largest donated item ever, after the aircraft carrier
Russia "donated" to India (I think it was in need of $2B worth of repairs...)

~~~
oh_sigh
The family that started the Patagonia brand donated 1600 mi^2 of land to Chile
to form a national park. That's way bigger than a boat(and probably cheaper to
maintain too)!

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m3at
I am not versed into fashion or thrift stores, but the author managed to make
it interesting. I appreciate the attention to details, the quality of
visualisations and transparency about data acquisition (isn't scrapping 50% of
data science?). Good read, thanks!

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CobrastanJorji
I want to applaud the author for loudly calling out the likelihood that their
own data is bad and the reasons for that. You hardly ever see articles like
this mention that, and if they do it's usually a quick aside.

~~~
ImaCake
I suspect this has something to do with the author's intentions. The author
here has no reward attached to people believing her conclusions drawn from
this data. Instead she may wish to just show people "look at this dumb cool
thing I made" or she is using this to pitch her skills at potential
recruiters, in which case honesty is a good policy to filter for good
employers.

For scientists and commercial interests, the quality of the data could be
fundamental to the point they are trying to make. So admitting their data
sucks would basically ruin their whole argument, or at least make people more
skeptical about the conclusions drawn. In science, the bad data eventually
gets called out and everyone else is left wondering why the miracle panacea
for discovering the genetic basis of complex disease still hasn't solved
schizophrenia.

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peterwwillis
For those who don't know, reading the product descriptions on shopgoodwill.com
listings can be downright comical. They're written by random employees of
random Goodwill stores, of items which they may not understand or have a very
pointed opinion about. If you're really bored it can be a goldmine of mild
entertainment.

It's sad that they revamped their website. It used to look like a 1990's
e-Cart website, which was so wonderfully functional and compact. Back to
2010's "endlessly scrolling through giant type faces and no content" design...

~~~
granshaw
No kidding, from the frontpage:

HOLY CANNOLI !! 100 Charms 925 Ultimate Bracelet

 __THIS IS THE FINAL BRACELET YOU HAVE TO FACE AFTER DEFEATING ALL OTHER PUNY
BRACELETS - "BOSS BRACELET"

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hownottowrite
Why is the title “weirdly detailed”? Apparel, especially women’s apparel, is a
massive market segment. Even if they’re only talking about thrift stores it’s
an important economic subject.

~~~
jjmccoolguy
I do love all this conjecture on the titling (and your comment that women's
clothing is an important subject helps me feel a bit validated in my time
spent on this). I categorize it as weird because it's quite niche, there's no
actual call to action or news story, and I spent waaaaay too much time on it.

~~~
hownottowrite
Ha! I thought as much.

Women’s apparel is a 600B industry. It is highly segmented, and literal armies
of people analyze category and product performance across millions of skus. So
spending a lot of time on something like this is definitely not unusual.

~~~
owenmarshall
It's really fun to see the moment people realize things like this exist
outside their bubble of knowledge.

I had some first and second-hand knowledge around pricing household
appliances. There's a common assumption that "the manufacturer says 'charge
X'", the retailer charges X+Y% and you all go home happy. And you could not be
further from the truth if you tried: pricing is an insanely complicated
process with negotiation from both sides and monitored by an army of secret
shoppers to keep both sides honest.

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ayakura
In the "Goodwill Tops by State Over Time" blocks there's a state called
Michegan right above Michigan. Made me look up to see if it was called that at
any point in the past, but it seems to be a typo :)

~~~
jjmccoolguy
Ahhhhhhhh, sorry mate, good catch. I'll fix after work. I'm Canadian if it
gets me a little off the hook.

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skuthus
Didn't Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop' come out in 2016? Maybe this explains the
price increase in 2016

~~~
ajkjk
more like 2012

~~~
skuthus
Ah yeah you're right

~~~
smabie
The days are long but the years, short.

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aasasd
I can't make sense of ‘Price relative to state average’. That's relative
inside each state, right? But how can things in Carolina, Florida, Texas and
West Virginia always cost more than the average?

Meanwhile, ‘Price relative to overall average’ is all white due to one point
in 2019 in Missouri at 245 bucks. But how many of those 245-bucks items were
sold that they aren't absorbed by the overall average?

Also, since Pennsylvania apparently dominates 2018-19, perhaps it skews
overall data considerably.

~~~
jjmccoolguy
You make some good points, I made some bad choices. To address: > Yes, I meant
relative inside each state but phrased it poorly > With median price, I
probably should have limited it to periods and states selling more than x
items > And, yeah, Pennsylvania, and in particular the seller labelled
"Goodwill Industries of North Central PA, Inc." dominates the market and
should maybe have been excluded. I thought I'd get away with this by doing
inner-state comparisons but it's still unideal

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dave_aiello
My thought after reading several paragraphs is that the author may have chosen
women's tops for analysis because that's the group of items where the greatest
depth of data exists across all of Goodwill's categorized SKUs.

The article begins with "After 10ish years of second-hand shopping, I've
started to ask myself a lot of questions about the clothes I've been
buying..." but never says that the author buys this sort of item in
particular.

~~~
jjmccoolguy
Consider yourself lucky that I cut the over-long biographical introduction
about my views on shopping and the effect of going back to school on my
budget. I can tell you right now: neither funny nor interesting.

But for your curiosity, I chose women's tops because it's an item I buy, it
represents a good portion of Goodwill sales (though I don't know how much),
and it gives some consistent area for comparison more than if I was looking
at, say, everything from old TVs to ceramic knick knacks.

I'm pretty thrilled you read several paragraphs though, haha.

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sct202
I like they you have a section about data quality, but because this is only of
things listed on their website there's going to be a lot of underlying bias of
what was chosen to be listed on the website. There might be some kind of
company policy that is driving the big shifts in # listings, brands that are
considered good enough to put online, and price.

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jjmccoolguy
Just fixed the typo on "disproportionately" that was pointed out, and the
duplication/misspelling of Michigan as "Michigan."

Will probably not address the other suggestions tonight and just chill.

Thanks everyone for your interest! I honestly thought this would die in "new."

~~~
tropdrop
> _This project was done without Goodwill 's assistance or permission._

May I ask about this - why no permission? Did you attempt to reach out to
Goodwill to explain the kind of project you're embarking on and just didn't
receive a response?

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dahart
Is the graph at the bottom showing volume of sales increasing, or lack of data
before 2018? I didn’t entirely understand the comments about gaps in data,
what specifically is being referred to (e.g. the big dip in 2019, or the
noise, or the 5x jump from 2017 to 2018?). While reading, I was wondering what
the volume of sales were and if that explained price increases. If the volume
really increased more than 10x, it’d be surprising if prices didn’t go up even
more than they did, right? But I guess volume didn’t jump this big this fast?

It might also be nice to adjust for inflation over the last decade, which
hasn’t been huge, but it makes a little difference in the price curves over
time.

~~~
aasasd
Gaps might be due to the fact that scraping requires fiddling with the code
every time the site changes even invisibly—or data just stops coming in.

~~~
jjmccoolguy
Can't answer conclusively. The big dip and the fall-off at the end were
probably errors in my scraping. The site went down for a bit at a couple
points, and the way dates were formatted changed a bit, all of which I thought
I handled correctly but maybe not. And at a certain point of combing back over
gaps, I just decided to be done.

I strongly get the impression that sales volumes did increase from 2014
onward, but sales in 2014, particularly in the early range there, probably
appear lower than they are. IDs in that range sometimes returned normal
Goodwill item pages, and sometimes returned 404-type pages. Maybe they
migrated systems or something around that time?

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sireat
Quite a nice job on visualizations!

This looks like all d3 or was there anything else you used?

~~~
jjmccoolguy
Aw shucks! It is indeed d3, and, as per the commenter below, uses very very
lightly adapted tufte.css for layout.

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IncandesParsnip
This was weirdly fascinating for a topic I've never been curious about.

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ThrowawayQz42x
Neat! This may be a dumb question, but OP, have you been scraping price data
since 2014, or are all those old listings still around on the site?

~~~
jjmccoolguy
Sorry, I was just vague. I scraped data for old listings around the site which
seemed to go back to around 2014ish. Most data I collected last summer and
over Christmas, and then it sat around for a long time.

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dev_tty01
The "Number of Women's Tops Over Time" graph may be partially showing the
Marie Kondo effect.

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dec0dedab0de
shopgoodwill has a weird way of doing shipping and handling. I'm assuming that
is not included in these results, because I didn't see it mentioned.

The last time I used the site many of the stores would set high handling
prices, which basically acted as a starting bid. I did notice that some stores
started to lower their handling price, if that caught on it could account for
some of the changes. The handling price is directly related to how much people
are willing to bid on a price. Shipping is also be a factor, but would be
harder to gather the data as it is based on the destination.

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gandreani
In the "Goodwill Tops by State Over Time" section, it seems like Missouri is
skewing the scale when I select "Price relative to overall average".

It's a shame I was really interested in that particular viz!

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war1025
My wife gets nearly all of her clothes and our kids clothes from Salvation
Army. There seems to always be a good selection for that. Men's clothing is
much harder to find second hand in my experience.

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malwarebytess
Angle I didn't see in your article: the price increases are a result of
flipping finding true market value for an item. The ebay-et.al. effect.

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imutemyteam
Why are USED t-shirts selling at 8 dollars wtf??

~~~
smabie
Because all the super cheap stuff goes to Africa and is then sold by the bale
to small resellers. These small resellers then sell every shirt for the same
price. Then local women buy the shirts they like and sell them at a markup.

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joering2
Please do not donate to GoodWill. Altho their mission is good, its all hard
core capitalism from there. Just Google "Goodwill owner house" to see his
multi million dollar mansions all over USA. He was caught giving himself
$250,000 raise while battling employees for disability claims worth pennies to
the company. If you have clothes to donate, meet any homeless person they will
get most from you or tell you where to go to give it all out to other homeless
people.

~~~
slubian
[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/executive-salaries-
chariti...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/executive-salaries-charities/)

~~~
joering2
So the guy made $750,000. Whats your point ??

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btbuildem
Top notch visualizations!

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zeveb
The (very attractive) charts do not display without JavaScript enabled. Surely
this is a textbook example of where graceful degradation would come in handy,
as a simple image without interactivity is still useful.

Also the annotations, which are simple text, do not show up without
JavaScript. This is even worse: if there is anything HTML is capable of doing,
it is putting text on a screen!

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tkeAmarktinClss
Prices have gone up? Tell the federal reserve, I'm sure they will be shocked
/s

I don't think quality has anything to do with it. Employees are more expensive
because life is more expensive.

~~~
smabie
The price of clothing has gotten significantly cheaper since the 80s.

