I know that Target sells excess inventory on secondipity. I've got a few extremely good deals there, on kitchen appliances, Gillette razor blades, other stuff. All appeared to be in brand-new condition.
Sometime started a fire in a backyard fire pit, IN my local target. Due to smoke damage, they donated almost the entire store inventory to the local goodwill, who in turn (based on my past experience volunteering there) probably threw 90% of it away.
Slightly related - I overheard a little argument at my local (hospital charity) thrift store yesterday.
Turns out some of the volunteers were marking down items - which may be within their authority to do - and then buying these marked down items for themselves ... before they even hit the store shelves. Oops.
I was in a charity shop recently and the manager explained to me that a big pile of recently-arrived stock (of clothing in this case) was not yet for sale because it hadn't been picked by the volunteers yet.
Since the shop is staffed by unpaid volunteers they get first bite at anything coming in. I gather they pay normal rates for whatever they take.
I have no problem with this at all. This seems like the very least perk they could be offered. Frankly, if I was running the place each volunteer would get their stuff for free (up to some value per month.)
Giving volunteers huge deals on potentially expensive stuff (some over $1000) seems against the spirit of "volunteering" at a store whose proceeds go to the Children's Hospital.
Now that I think about it, this may even be against some IRS regulation governing non-profits.
> I gather they pay normal rates for whatever they take.
Well, what's "normal" is the question. At the store I frequent, the volunteers themselves set the rates.
The charity shop in question wasn't selling stuff for $1000. I suspect you'd be hard-pressed to find something for $100.
Of course this approach is open to abuse. But I suspect pricing was usually on the "low end of normal". There are multiple volunteers, all donating their time so the charity gets some income. I don't think there's much risk of there being excessive abuse.
I'm pretty sure the IRS isn't interested. If the store wanted to give stuff away they could.
The problem is they degrade the value preposition of the shop. If it's understood that the shop doesn't have enough things people want then people will go elsewhere and the charity raises less. The volunteers reallocate the producer surplus meant for the hospital into their own pockets.
There were plenty of people in the shop, so I don't think this is in play for them.
It's not like the volunteers are carting of say "the best books". They just get to see the books first, and there might be something they like. Ditto clothes. Ditto kitchen, dvds, and whatever else was coming in.
Clearly though context matters. This in a jurisdiction that doesn't offer tax incentives for donations, doesn't have $1000 items, and wouldn't know what 3D filliment is, much less anyone to sell it to.
If, over time, a thrift store gets a reputation of never having great stuff or great deals (because the volunteers take the best for themselves), over time that store will lose customer and donor interest and momentum.
This is also why these stores don't like people shopping with price-comparison scanners.
I see what you're saying, I just don't agree about the incentives.
The donors want to get a tax break, and I suspect lack even token concern about what happens to the goods as long as they get that tax break.
The store and charity want money in exchange for those donated goods. They don't care who is paying nor why, they just want the money.
If the volunteers are picking up all of the items worth anything, that's likely fine with all of the involved parties other than other customers. The donors are still getting tax breaks, the charity is still getting their money. The stuff left over wasn't going to sell anyways (otherwise customers would still come in to buy that stuff).
The volunteers are still customers, they're just also unpaid employees.
> This is also why these stores don't like people shopping with price-comparison scanners.
Anecdata, but the ones I've been to don't care. There's about a 50/50 split in my area between stores that pay employees to pick out anything obviously valuable before selling the rest, and stores that have presumably decided it's better/easier to just leave everything intact and sell as is.
I still go sometimes, because there's a wide range of items that either their employees don't know to pick or just aren't worth trying to resell. Eg they almost always pass over 3D printer filament (maybe because of shipping costs), so I buy it up for ~$5/kg. There's really quite a few niches that they either don't think are worth reselling or just lack the knowledge to know to resell.
Let me guess, probably not a lot of stories about female genital mutilation, about the criminalization (upto capital punishment) of gay people, about women being beaten to death for refusing to wear a hijab, etc.
I think the problem the Muslim world faces is that it is too often summarized by such aspects. It’s a diverse civilization with a rich history and complexities like any other. We hardly associate all of Western or Christian civilization with pedophile priests, Timothy McVeigh and Mormon cults.
One must also remember the west was hardly a Utopia for LGBT rights until a decade or two ago and to this day huge swaths of the US are filled with evangelical fanatics.
> We hardly associate all of Western or Christian civilization with pedophile priests, Timothy McVeigh and Mormon cults.
Let's start with women. They're roughly half the population. If they are being systematically mistreated, that's a much, MUCH higher percentage than are affected by Catholic priests, Timothy McVeigh, and the Mormons.
Also, the mistreatment of women is in most cases baked into the laws in "the Muslim world." Christian pedophilia, as widespread and terrible as it is, is still illegal. (Yes, Trump II may change that.)
I'm hardly an apologist for the excesses of the West, and Christianity and Islam are both "religions of the book." The difference is that Christianity has evolved through a process of liberalization, and most Western countries aren't literally ruled by "the book" in the way that "the Muslim world" is. (Yes, Alito and Coney Barrett want to change that.)
I think you're just arguing or the sake of arguing. Within two SDs of the mean income, I doubt there's a person alive - and definitely not a woman or gay person! - who would rather live in "the Muslim world" than in the West. And that's a terrible shame, but it's also self-inflicted harm by most of those countries.
Coincidentally, I was just watching a video about how South Africa has gone downhill - and that slide was hastened by McKinsey advising the crooked "Gupta brothers" on how to most efficiently rip off the country.
Or it could be that, when you search something, you also click through to some of the results, where FB/AdWords and other trackers are present.
Alternatively, there was a fallacy of human mind(forgot the name), where if you think of something, your brain will start focusing on the random occurrences of that things in all places. So, those ads were always there, your brain just started focusing suddenly on those as you were thinking of those things.
duckduckgo don't prevent website to track you or deposit cookies etc. Once you're on a website, let's say twitter, duckduckgo does nothing.
> When you view Twitter content such as embedded Tweets, buttons, or timelines integrated into other websites using Twitter for Websites, Twitter may receive information, including the web page you visited, your IP address, browser type, operating system, and cookie information. (https://developer.x.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/privacy)
So, if you visit a news paper that have embedded twitter post in it, twitter might know you passed by this website.
Norway is 12.2% immigrants, and many of those are from the Middle East.
The "least diverse [rich] country in the world" is probably S Korea.
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