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Yesterday at my local “Gucci” Goodwill I had to take my child to the bathroom. As I’m standing in the back room waiting on him, I like to look around and see what stuff they AREN’T putting out on the shelves (they sell online anything really nice).
I notice something new: They have two large pallets of books. One pallet says “already scanned”. In between the pallets is a station with a laptop and a barcode scanner. I asked one of the workers who knows I’m a reseller if they were selling books online now. He said no. They scan all books into that computer and there is a company who buys certain books from them. I can’t remember the name of the company unfortunately.
So they scan each book and the scanning software tells them “yay” or “nay” if the company will buy the book and how much they will pay. Then they box up all the sold books and ship them off.
So I abandoned the FBA book selling business a while back, but this is VERY bad news for anyone still selling books. The more tech friendly thrifts will eventually all start doing this I assume.
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I think anything that is scannable is going to be a tough business to get into because it does make it so easy. So books, wholesale, returns, etc.
But finding and selling the older, weird stuff will always be easier to make money because there’s less competition because it’s more difficult to identify and price.
If it’s easy to find and sell, you got to be ready for everyone else who also know how easy it is to find and sell.
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For some reason, my library system hasn’t started doing this yet (that I know of). The booksale still has real gems and I do Amazon FBA for books with pretty good (but modest scale) profits. I personally can’t believe that my library hasn’t gotten the memo that they should be doing Amazon FBA themselves, or at least outsource this somehow. It would make a lot more $ for them then the booksales do, presumably. Fingers crossed that they won’t get the memo!
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Where I live, Goodwill has a spin-off bookstore concept called “Goodies”.
It has a Starbucks environment, with all the books very organized, and at higher then usual Goodwill pricing (usually half the original printed book cost).
They might be saving books for there “Goodies” stores?
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Funny I was just going to mention this too. At my local Goodwill store an employee struck up a conversation with me while I was in the book section. He told me that when they receive book donations in the store they all go to a central location to be scanned, and the un-valuable ones are returned to be sold in the local Goodwill stores. Even with that knowledge they are still pricing some books at 4.99+ which is insane IMO.
This actually explains a lot because I used to be able to find high value books in my local Goodwill. At least now I know not to waste my time with their books any more.
One thing I have learned with Goodwill’s in my area is they are not experts on every thing. I can still find high value board games for example at my local goodwill.
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Absolutely. Our Gucci Goodwill is pretty darn good at finding valuable stuff and pricing accordingly. They are the hub store that all other stores send stuff to sort and price.
That being said, I’m still WAAAY better than them. They can pluck the low hanging fruit but they miss tons of very valuable stuff.
They also overprice for this area regularly, so high price items make it to 50% off tag and even the 99 cent clearance tags pretty regularly. We go every Sunday now when they switch the tags and I do very well on the 99 cent tag sale.
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