Goodwill Central Coast Outlet — Attraction in Salinas

This review is about the Goodwill Outlet Store on Moffett St near the airport. Hours can vary without notice due to COVID-19 pandemic concerns. Current hours as of Sept 2020 are 8AM - 6PM, 7 days/wk. No children under 15 allowed. Masks must be worn. Restrooms & drinking fountains are closed. BTW, sanitary actions such as wiping carts down with disinfectant only appear to occur after store closes.

Two to three times per day during business hours, the store closes for about 1/2 hour so that new tables of fresh merchandise can be brought out without causing a stampede of bargain-hunting customers. Prior to bringing out the new merchandise, all customers must check out & the front doors are closed. A new line of customers waiting to get in the store then forms.

The store is limiting occupancy to about 45 people. The limit is most heavily enforced when the store first opens (or reopens). After this, admission is restricted when customers accumulate to the point that they begin to stop social distancing and/or if they exceed 4 persons per merchandise table.

I personally recommend customers wear mechanic's gloves to protect their hands as they sort merchandise. These are avail for a few bucks at Harbor Freight. Unfortunately, there are often large pictures with picture-frame glass mixed in the merchandise in the roll-around tables. This glass often gets broken due to customer greed & haste. IMO, Goodwill employees should be required to put all such pictures & glass in bins dedicated to this purpose else a lawsuit is inevitable.

Due to the large number of customers in the store and the nature of people jockeying to grab a bargain, social distancing is not always practiced by customers. This makes this store not as safe as a regular retail store where social distancing is more consistently followed. That said, roof-top air-conditioners (when on) provide excellent ventilation & that does help reduce the chance of infection. If you are careful to quickly back off and maintain social distance from those that encroach, especially from those that are speaking, if you don't touch your face, and if you sanitize your hands immediately after leaving, then shopping here may be OK. Experts generally agree that you usually need to be in close contact with an infected person for at least several minutes to become infected unless they directly cough or sneeze on or near you. However, talking is not that much better, so again, back away.

To be a bit safer, I leave the merchandise I buy untouched in my hot dry car for about 3 days after purchase. This increases the odds that any virus on it is dead before I handle it again. I put my masks and gloves on the dashboard where they are exposed to the sun. I have several sets so I can rotate. I use a different set of PPE for the grocery store than for stores such as this.

I feel sorry for the store employees as they are likely at the most at risk of COVID-19 exposure. There is very limited Plexiglas shielding at the cash registers, and employees spend a lot of time on the sales floor cleaning up merchandise that has fallen. Customers seem to enter employees' 6' social-distancing space quite freely and employees, in trying to get their work done quickly, often encroach on the six-foot space of customers. That said, I am told that to date, no employees at this location have come down sick. That is a very good sign, though some employees may have been infected but remained asymptomatic.

If the pandemic worsens or if infection contact tracing ever shows this store was a COVID-19 hotspot, the health department may shut this place down until Goodwill does a major merchandising reformat. With the large number of customers churning through disorganized bins, the store currently bears more similarity to a casino or a theater concession store than it does to a retail store. Theaters and I believe casinos have been deemed not safe to reopen. If you shop here, much of the responsibility to avoid infection is on you. If this critique concerns you, this is probably not the store for you...

The employees are very helpful & do the best they can to keep it clean & safe for everyone so its a great place to look for clothing,shoes,dvds,purses etc.without spending alot of cash which sometimes can be as good a shape as buying them brand new you just have to take your time & dig through it all really good...i have found some unique items as well as few valuable antiques which can be overlooked by majority of people who shop here so if you have a good eye for those sort of things you are going to definitely find way more of that here than many of the other locations and thrift stores since most of the people who go here dont look for anything other than the clothes which is the only issue many seem to have at this place... The people who work here are always courteous so i give the place & workers 5 stars...its just the selfish and inconsiderate way some people are when looking through these bins..that is what ruins it for rest of us by the way they dig it all into couple carts without letting anyone really have a chance to see aanything due to so many of them picking up huge piles at a time like hyenas and putting stuff into bins or carts etc. always taking what they want out then they inconsiderately leave all the leftovers on floor for the workers to end up having to clean after... It was hard at first to score any of the good stuff but after awhile i got tired of letting those greedy people pillage through it all like they did which i now feel isnt as bad once i stopped being too uncomfortable saying excuse me when it is necessary...i know so many timid & shy aka introverted people like myself at first will sorta feel its a bit overwhelming at first but once you start to find those awesome things all that goes away real quick...So dont let first impressions or the groups of greedy hippos ruin all the fun or lose that digger passion of sharing with one another since we all go through hard times & have bills to pay which is why i aint too proud to get my hands dirty & save me some money especially being a mom with a teenage daughter who wants all that overpriced namebrand stuff it really helps finding alot of that brand name stuff here for a dollar instead of 70-80 bucks at the mall which is why i recommend this place especially to all the parents out there A fave place to go whenever i have any free time... Never know what great stuff im going...

After going to the Goodwill outlet again I was quite disappointed in the way that my friend was treated after she had an issue with somebody who had been a local who'd been there all the time he was obviously taking advantage of the fact that he was at Goodwill every day because he probably lived in Salinas and my friend was basically told that he's here everyday why do we need you I'm no longer going to be traveling to go to this Goodwill to buy anything I find their prices way too high for a company we're coming gets her inventory for free from the general public how they can go about charging the prices that they do is beyond me I remember time when this company was set up and in a position to being a tax exempt charity before it became a corporation and we're helping people who couldn't afford clothing and couldn't afford to do go to the store and buy stuff new they would go there to get it at a much cheaper price the stuff is being donated to you how you can go about charging $7 for a shirt is outrageous they should be ashamed of themselves they really should I choose to not deal with a corporation anymore salvation army and St Vincent de Paul or two very good terrible organizations that also help men and women that are poor and don't gouge and their slogan were helping people change their lives by paying the minimum wage you can't even live on that their CEOs are making hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses though...