The monthly tour of Goodwill of Orange County’s regional donations warehouse, headquarters, and retail store complex in Santa Ana is a weirdly popular exercise in sensory overload and abject terror at what we have wrought with our disposable economy.
Visually arresting and filled with jarring contradictions—the junkyard chaos hides behind a stand-alone electronics retail outlet that mimics the clean lines and natural surfaces of an Apple store—the place is the size of a couple of Walmart Supercenters. Its interior geography is built of mountainous piles of used shoes; pallet after pallet of electronics stacked like cordwood; warehouse floors jammed with furniture, lamps, appliances, and kitchenware; and ceiling-high towers of used clothes, compressed into bundled blocks with wild, multicolored surfaces reminiscent of Jackson Pollock knockoffs.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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The electronics-repair workbenches are surrounded by an army of corrugated boxes called Gaylords that are the size of four washing machines, filled to the brim with keyboards, computer monitors, and printers. None of this is visible to outsiders other than tour participants; the rest see just the public-facing front: the cheerful electronics store, a home goods market, and a vast, brightly lit clothing boutique.
The place is fueled via a hectic but efficient drive-up/drop-off terminal shaped like a mini-version of LAX’s dreaded horseshoe, next to a sprawling, semi-enclosed “marketplace” where tons of fast-fashion discards are sold not by the garment but by the pound. And the stuff moves fast once it lands at this last-chance way station: the terminal fills and empties and refills with our discards every day.
“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet,” says Danielle Sheets, whose duties as development director for Goodwill of Orange County include conducting tours. She cautions everyone to stand back as a forklift moves by hauling a Gaylord filled with shoes missing their mate. “Yes,” she assures a questioner, “there’s a market for those, too. We don’t mess around here.”
Her charges for this morning’s tour include staffers from area nonprofits, local government officials, businesspeople interested in hiring workers trained by Goodwill (that’s what most of the earnings from selling all this stuff pays for), and curiosity seekers like me. We’re all wearing the same slack expression punctuated by occasional gasps at some crazy statistic Sheets throws at us: at the Orange County Goodwill alone, for example, 60 million pounds of stuff was diverted from local landfills last year, leading to $113 million in revenue for local thrift sales and fundraising.
This trash-to-treasure logistics feat is big business with a big footprint—not the musty, dusty Goodwill of the past. Beneath the cathedral-high ceilings, one alcove houses the bright lights of a makeshift studio where a photographer shoots products to post on the ShopGoodwill.com auction site—a $270-million-a-year online-retail operation that is the largest nonprofit e-tailer in the world.
“If you think this is big, you’ve got to see our distribution center,” Sheets adds. “It’s more than twice the size of this building, and it will blow your mind.”
She’s correct. It’s not on the official tour, but that’s my next stop: a 100,000-square-foot, two-story structure in nearby Tustin filled with clothing-crammed Gaylords. Combined, these clothes would make a mountain substantially higher than the building itself. So much stuff constantly flows through here that giant compacting machines are needed to compress fabrics too poor in quality for retail into 1,000-pound bricks for wholesalers and recyclers. The machines run nonstop, like the consumer economy that feeds their metal jaws.
As she walks through a donations warehouse or a retail store, Nicole Suydam is on a first-name basis with every staffer she encounters, many of whom have worked here for years. She says she’s an inveterate Goodwill shopper, but the casually elegant business attire of the Goodwill of Orange County CEO makes a sharp contrast with the contents of the warehouse as well as the more rugged work clothes of her staff. Her banter is natural and unforced as she chats with a line of women sorting incoming donations into multiple streams: boutique, marketplace, online auction site, and the unsellable. A sorter shares that she has been employed here for nine years. “I like the work,” she says, “but I’m still new.” This sounds like a jest, but Suydam later says it’s not: everyone else on the sorting line today has been on the job for double digits.
“We like to say people come here for a career—either to stay here for one or to leave us for one,” Suydam says. “Either way is a win. That’s our mission. The donations, the sales, everything else is to pay for that, to give people a hand up.”
Many of her employees were once considered unemployable, whether they were unhoused, battling addiction, formerly imprisoned, or disabled. Goodwill’s business model is to sell used stuff, but its purpose is to train such workers, employ them, and then help them either stay on and advance in the organization or find jobs elsewhere. Tucked away in the far reaches of the warehouse is a life-size mock-up retail store used for year-round training.
Suydam, who is 50, took over as CEO nearly six years ago. She is the first woman to lead the regional organization in its 100-year history. The former CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank’s Orange County operation, Suydam had a long history before that as a Goodwill executive. So she arrived with an insider’s view of the place and people—and her modernization plans ready to go.
Upgrading the appearance and service at Goodwill stores was a priority, and Suydam shows a proprietary interest during the tour. Several store staffers exchange grins when she stops to move clothes that customers have hung in the wrong spot. “I can’t help myself,” the CEO says. But the attention to detail and decor has paid off with rising sales and a vibe that is more T.J. Maxx.
Founded by a Methodist minister in Boston in 1902, Goodwill has been a familiar presence for generations—that place where you drop off boxes of old junk and clothes. It has grown into a federation of 154 independently governed regional organizations that operate 3,200 thrift stores in the United States and Canada. Its total revenue in 2022 was $7.6 billion, and it is ranked eighth on the Forbes list of the biggest U.S. charities. That’s especially impressive when you consider that the top charities are wealthy, endowed medical foundations such as the Mayo Clinic.
Thanks to Orange County, the national Goodwill network has also emerged as a powerhouse in the online-thrifting industry. In 1999, a previous Orange County Goodwill CEO developed ShopGoodwill.com, which sells goods from stores all over the country. Suydam has supercharged the endeavor: it took more than 20 years for the site to reach $1 billion in total sales; in five years under Suydam, it has hit $2 billion.
Suydam credits the success in part to amping up customer service and modernizing the website, but she says much of it is due to the meteoric rise in thrifting over the past few years. Not only Gen Z shoppers love to buy used; 52 percent of all U.S. consumers bought secondhand apparel at least once in 2022. Thrifting isn’t just a trend—it’s the fastest-growing segment of the fashion industry.
The heart of ShopGoodwill.com is an e-commerce hub three miles from the Orange County Goodwill headquarters. The sprawling warehouse is both base camp for the nationwide auction site and fulfillment center for the regional Goodwill’s virtual sales of locally donated goods.
It offers yet another fascinating glimpse into this trash-to-treasure industry. Rare books can bring in hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of dollars. A former employee of the beloved Tower Records chain presides over vintage vinyl—her collection looks like, well, a record store in the middle of a warehouse. Meanwhile, staffers in the jewelry department are going to school to become certified gemologists on Goodwill’s dime. An employee in the locked cage that surrounds the jewelry operation is a master detangler of knotted necklaces and snarled chains.
“No one else can do what he does,” marvels e-commerce business operations manager Ted Mollenkramer, who left a lucrative eBay business 12 years ago for Goodwill. “Things we’d have to practically give away now fetch hundreds of dollars when he’s through with them.”
One-of-a-kind jobs at the hub also offer opportunities for workers who have difficulty staying employed elsewhere. Taylor Harkins, born with multiple disabilities, was in danger of being fired from the Goodwill computer department when Mollenkramer saw that he had an untapped skill: he could build anything with Legos.
Now Harkins’s minimum-wage job—which is more than his parents and physician ever dreamed was possible—is to create unique sets and scenes with the hundreds of pounds of old mixed Legos that pour into this Goodwill outpost every month. He says he loves crafting movie scenes, chess sets, space battles, and whatever else strikes his fancy—and his custom Legos kits have set off bidding wars.
The experience of finding work and a place in life, employees tell me, is life-changing. “I feel valued,” says customer service agent Oscar Torres. “For years, I was depressed after my accident and didn’t feel that way.”
Torres, 35, has used a wheelchair since he was 17 because of a spinal injury from a crash during a street race. After his surgeries and rehab, he had trouble finding a job. Now he helps people experiencing difficulties with their online bidding and purchases. They’re often surprised, he says, when a human being gets back to them quickly and fixes things—an experience seldom associated with online retail.
“Every day,” he says, “I get to solve a problem and make someone feel better.”
Goodwill stands at an odd cultural, economic, and environmental crossroads, both solution to and symptom of our unsustainable disposable economy. Its business model and mission, built on the reuse economy, are dependent on our profoundly wasteful ways.
Yet it rescues our consumer discards from the trash and uses the proceeds to help so many people whom society has discarded find productive employment and rebuild their lives. “The beauty of Goodwill is that it works both ways,” Suydam says. “The workers who make it their career see this as their calling, because they’re part of something bigger that can impact the community.”•
Edward Humes’s latest book is Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World.
