Goodwill Northern Michigan – Traverse City — Local services in Garfield Township

OUTLET SPECIFIC REVIEW

The goodwill has been pretty bad for years with excessively cherry picked stock (they sell online through the goodwill website and the good items go here), but the outlet was TERRIBLE.

To be fair, the outlet only opened yesterday, so please bear that in mind when reading this review.

The bins are very high, it's difficult to bend to get into them and good luck reaching the bottom.

Everything is sorted. If you've been to other goodwill outlets, you know that's a bad sign. At other outlets the only organization is hard goods/shoes and then clothing. These were much more orderly and sorted. They had shoe and book bins. Cute. They've been cherry picked and you're not going to find anything good. We didn't. Normally we spend hours at the bins. We spent 15 minutes here and gave up.

There's minimal stock. It's not even 1/4 of the size of the grand rapids bins. It's not so much an outlet as a closet where the stuff they couldn't sell in store (because they price too high, haven't seen anything under $3.99 here including fricking books, since pre-covid) ended up.

They are only planning to be open two days a week for the foreseeable future. Friday and Saturday 10-5. Plenty of time for them to make sure nothing valuable is actually left for YOU to pick up.

The only items we saw were clothing, linens, shoes, bags and books. There were no electronics, housewares, decorative items or kids toys. It was very boring, not much fun to shift through these bins at all.

Bottom line: At present, for the reasons above, this is not worth my time, and I don't think it's going to be worth most people's time. I will continue with frequently going to the outlets in Grand Rapids and Muskegon where the outlets are better run and more of a bargain hunt.

If you're looking for some good local thrifts in and around TC, the best I can recommend is Double Edge Resale, Restored Treasures and the Acme Christian Thrift, which is a bit of a hike to Williamsburg, but a much better place that's not so blatantly greedy.

The response from the store below in covers some of the issues with the store, and the plan appears to be to only run the outlet two days a week or I am sure they would've included that in their PR heavy response.

Two days a week is not a goodwill outlet. It's a money grab. Go to Grand Rapids or Muskegon for a true...

Update: took away a star as since my original review things have continued to decline. There's no longer any sales of any kind, everything is individually (over) priced, and often priced above original retail price Greedwill's outreach programs should be booming and rolling out across the country as their profits skyrocket, yet they aren't... Multiple times I overheard management discussing sales goals uncluding $7,000 a day. Workers all seem very unhappy and I'm assuming are not being compensated properly, it is overall so disappointing.

Prices have gotten insanely high at this goodwill. I have found some great home decor items, but clothing is usually damaged from the way GW tags (through the shoulder? come on! Just put in through the tag!) things, and most clothing is very old and outdated. Overall, worth a visit once in awhile but could...

I've always been a fan of everyone's in a while stop by and running into a thrift store to see what you can dig up. That's good will location has lots of clothes, but I'm more interested in locating hardware, electronics. And they used to have shelves full of items that sounds good will started centralizing and selling things online everything gets filtered through the back and things that are of any significant value, I've sent to a centralized location and put online. Basically what used to be awesome for shelves of rummaging goods, has turned into Dusty empty shelves. My fascination with objects, and repurpose sing them has turned me off to this location and good wills presorting of donated items to be centralized if they have value. I thought the whole point was to thrift and occasionally stumble on some cool nostalgic perhaps...