[HN Gopher] A graphical analysis of women's tops sold on Goodwil...
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A graphical analysis of women's tops sold on Goodwill's website
Author : jjmccoolguy
Score : 328 points
Date : 2020-07-08 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (goodwill.awardwinninghuman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (goodwill.awardwinninghuman.com)
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| The "Number of Women's Tops Over Time" graph may be partially
| showing the Marie Kondo effect.
| joering2 wrote:
| Please do not donate to GoodWill. Altho their mission is good,
| its all hard core capitalism from there. Just Google "Goodwill
| owner house" to see his multi million dollar mansions all over
| USA. He was caught giving himself $250,000 raise while battling
| employees for disability claims worth pennies to the company. If
| you have clothes to donate, meet any homeless person they will
| get most from you or tell you where to go to give it all out to
| other homeless people.
| peterwwillis wrote:
| For those who don't know, reading the product descriptions on
| shopgoodwill.com listings can be downright comical. They're
| written by random employees of random Goodwill stores, of items
| which they may not understand or have a very pointed opinion
| about. If you're really bored it can be a goldmine of mild
| entertainment.
|
| It's sad that they revamped their website. It used to look like a
| 1990's e-Cart website, which was so wonderfully functional and
| compact. Back to 2010's "endlessly scrolling through giant type
| faces and no content" design...
| granshaw wrote:
| No kidding, from the frontpage:
|
| HOLY CANNOLI !! 100 Charms 925 Ultimate Bracelet
|
| __THIS IS THE FINAL BRACELET YOU HAVE TO FACE AFTER DEFEATING
| ALL OTHER PUNY BRACELETS - "BOSS BRACELET"
| IncandesParsnip wrote:
| This was weirdly fascinating for a topic I've never been curious
| about.
| m3at wrote:
| I am not versed into fashion or thrift stores, but the author
| managed to make it interesting. I appreciate the attention to
| details, the quality of visualisations and transparency about
| data acquisition (isn't scrapping 50% of data science?). Good
| read, thanks!
| ThrowawayQz42x wrote:
| Neat! This may be a dumb question, but OP, have you been scraping
| price data since 2014, or are all those old listings still around
| on the site?
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Sorry, I was just vague. I scraped data for old listings around
| the site which seemed to go back to around 2014ish. Most data I
| collected last summer and over Christmas, and then it sat
| around for a long time.
| aasasd wrote:
| I can't make sense of 'Price relative to state average'. That's
| relative inside each state, right? But how can things in
| Carolina, Florida, Texas and West Virginia always cost more than
| the average?
|
| Meanwhile, 'Price relative to overall average' is all white due
| to one point in 2019 in Missouri at 245 bucks. But how many of
| those 245-bucks items were sold that they aren't absorbed by the
| overall average?
|
| Also, since Pennsylvania apparently dominates 2018-19, perhaps it
| skews overall data considerably.
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| You make some good points, I made some bad choices. To address:
| > Yes, I meant relative inside each state but phrased it poorly
| > With median price, I probably should have limited it to
| periods and states selling more than x items > And, yeah,
| Pennsylvania, and in particular the seller labelled "Goodwill
| Industries of North Central PA, Inc." dominates the market and
| should maybe have been excluded. I thought I'd get away with
| this by doing inner-state comparisons but it's still unideal
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| shopgoodwill has a weird way of doing shipping and handling. I'm
| assuming that is not included in these results, because I didn't
| see it mentioned.
|
| The last time I used the site many of the stores would set high
| handling prices, which basically acted as a starting bid. I did
| notice that some stores started to lower their handling price, if
| that caught on it could account for some of the changes. The
| handling price is directly related to how much people are willing
| to bid on a price. Shipping is also be a factor, but would be
| harder to gather the data as it is based on the destination.
| magicnubs wrote:
| > There's still a high number of items from various in-house
| brands from Florida department store Bealls (namely Coral Bay,
| Reel Legends, and Dept 222)
|
| Looking at the chart, it appears these 3 brands were all in the
| top 4 most commonly sold (or at least available for sale) brands
| at Goodwill in by 2019, and they've been in the top 10 or so for
| years. I can't imagine organic amounts of resale from a Florida-
| only department store chain could account for this. So is Bealls
| just straight selling their old stock to Goodwill for cheap? Or
| maybe even giving it away as a write-off (and to reduce cost to
| store items they don't think they'll ever be able to sell). I
| wonder how much of Goodwill's stock actually comes from things
| like this, as opposed to houseful donations.
| bluntfang wrote:
| >I wonder how much of Goodwill's stock actually comes from
| things like this, as opposed to houseful donations.
|
| Anecdata. I worked at a goodwill in the early 2000s for
| community service. A lot of people donate soiled rubbish
| disguised as clothing that goes to landfill. I would have no
| doubt that Goodwill has partnerships with department
| stores...or else they wouldn't have anything to sell.
| megablast wrote:
| Most people do not.
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| There's some (easy) analysis to be done to look at if these
| brands are coming only from only one or two Goodwill sellers,
| which could help us better form a theory. I might take a look
| after work. Even then, I didn't want to go too far down that
| particular rabbit hole since understanding might (shudder)
| require me to get off the internet and call someone or
| something.
| magicnubs wrote:
| I liked the visualizations a lot by the way. Maybe you
| mentioned in the write-up and I missed it, but what did you
| use to make them? Checked the skills listed on your CV but
| didn't see any not-static visualization tools listed
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Thank you! I used d3.js, my first love.
| skellera wrote:
| I just went to Goodwill last weekend. They seemed to have more
| "new" items than I remembered. I assume it's cheap overstock
| that's donated vs marked down.
| josephmosby wrote:
| Fun hypothesis: a giant Florida Goodwill moved into an old
| Bealls in 2019. Bealls may have run a cost-benefit analysis and
| said "you know what, it's actually cheaper for us to sell all
| this old merch to Goodwill at a discount than for us to move it
| to the new store."
|
| https://www.willmeng.com/goodwill-store-moving-to-shopping-c...
| Joe8Bit wrote:
| Had limited experience of this while doing strategy work for a
| large UK fasion retailer.
|
| A significant proportion of items from a new range had been
| returned as faulty. When they investigated they realised a new
| factory they were using for this range had slipped a huge
| amount of bad items through the reatilers QA process. They
| ended up writing down the whole line and donating it to
| Oxfam/Redcross to be sold in their charity shops, very similar
| to Goodwill. It was 100,000's of items.
|
| They were already writing the goods down as a loss against
| their balance sheet and they managed to recoup a _small
| percentage_ of that loss as a tax deduction for the charity
| donation.
|
| It didn't happen often, but it wasn't the first time they'd
| done it
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I wonder if any of the price increase OP noticed is from
| liquidation retailers (both brick and mortar and online)
| buying and reselling a greater fraction of these runs of
| "faulty" items since that lets them recapture a greater
| percentage of what would be a loss.
| Joe8Bit wrote:
| FWIW this is also a relaitvley common practice for
| administrators when dealing with bankrupt companies. Donating
| goods they can't sell is often cheaper than storing them or
| paying for them to be disposed of!
| lozaning wrote:
| Being wrote off an entire 787 Dreamliner and donated it to
| the Pima Air And Space museum. It was going to cost to much
| to fix and have recertified after it went through testing,
| so they gave the whole thing away.
| frandroid wrote:
| Possibly the second largest donated item ever, after the
| aircraft carrier Russia "donated" to India (I think it
| was in need of $2B worth of repairs...)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| The family that started the Patagonia brand donated 1600
| mi^2 of land to Chile to form a national park. That's way
| bigger than a boat(and probably cheaper to maintain too)!
| wincy wrote:
| If you try to return a mattress you bought online this
| happens too. They'll have a truck from the Salvation Army
| stop by. Small write off I suppose. I "returned" an Amazon
| mattress but my wife didn't like it, and because of COVID
| they just refunded the money and told me I could keep it. I
| don't know what I'm gonna do with this extra king sized
| mattress though, guess I'll make a rather luxurious guest
| bedroom.
| PsylentKnight wrote:
| Bealls is based in Florida, it is not Florida-only.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Goodwill does alot of deals with retailers for excess inventory
| and reshopped returns. Target used to use them, for example.
|
| This is what TJ Maxx/Marshalls used to do. The market is pretty
| diverse for this type of thing. There's a whole industry around
| it.
| asdff wrote:
| Walk into a goodwill, and your answer will be obvious. Plenty
| of things are sold packaged and new in goodwill. Usually it's
| things like homegoods, in my experience.
| ggggtez wrote:
| Yes, stores often sell excess stock to goodwill.
| hownottowrite wrote:
| Why is the title "weirdly detailed"? Apparel, especially women's
| apparel, is a massive market segment. Even if they're only
| talking about thrift stores it's an important economic subject.
| rpiguy wrote:
| Titled like clickbait. "You won't believe what analysis of
| Goodwill women's tops sales reveals"
| mcphage wrote:
| This article is very much not clickbait.
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| I think it's a bit of clickbait. My very initial impression was
| that this was going to be a strange sexualized analysis of how
| women of varying body types would look in tops sold by
| Goodwill. That was followed by "but that's insane and this is
| on HN, it must be charts and graphs, hmm, better to click to
| confirm."
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| Agreed on clickbait, I thought it would be some near pervy
| analysis of how the tops made some guy feel..
| jjgreen wrote:
| ... so you clicked on it ...
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| That sounds like a better article.
| elicash wrote:
| It wasn't the original title, but this is explained in the
| closing sentence:
|
| > Hopefully, though, they'll see this content as it's intended
| to be seen: As a very weird love letter to thrifting from a
| very weird person.
|
| So, the author is admitting they are weird for doing such an
| unsolicited analysis. But weird in a good way.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Something can be both a not normal thing to do and a wonderful
| or useful thing to do.
| OJFord wrote:
| I think it means 'weirdly' as in 'obsessively', or 'nerding out
| over'.
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| I do love all this conjecture on the titling (and your comment
| that women's clothing is an important subject helps me feel a
| bit validated in my time spent on this). I categorize it as
| weird because it's quite niche, there's no actual call to
| action or news story, and I spent waaaaay too much time on it.
| hownottowrite wrote:
| Ha! I thought as much.
|
| Women's apparel is a 600B industry. It is highly segmented,
| and literal armies of people analyze category and product
| performance across millions of skus. So spending a lot of
| time on something like this is definitely not unusual.
| clairity wrote:
| fwiw, i think you can drop the '.com' from the title for a
| smoother punny title without ambiguity: "Goodwill.com
| Hunting" -> "Goodwill Hunting" since the movie is "Good Will
| Hunting". =)
| dahart wrote:
| One of the reasons I like Hacker News is seeing all the
| people who will commit to days/weeks/months of work just to
| satisfy their curiosity. You're in good company, this isn't
| weird by HN standards.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I would have said it's impressively detailed.
|
| This is describing what I imagine a few savvy bargain hunters
| know from experience and interest in the market. Being able to
| see massively undervalued items that don't fit in the
| catalogue, kind of like being able to pick horses at the races.
| dang wrote:
| Looks like a moderator took the weird details out of the title
| above. Submitted title was "Show HN: A weirdly detailed
| graphical analysis of women's tops sold by Goodwill".
|
| We took Show HN out too, because while this looks like an
| excellent submission, it's not a product or project that people
| can try out - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
| dave_aiello wrote:
| My thought after reading several paragraphs is that the author
| may have chosen women's tops for analysis because that's the
| group of items where the greatest depth of data exists across all
| of Goodwill's categorized SKUs.
|
| The article begins with "After 10ish years of second-hand
| shopping, I've started to ask myself a lot of questions about the
| clothes I've been buying..." but never says that the author buys
| this sort of item in particular.
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky that I cut the over-long biographical
| introduction about my views on shopping and the effect of going
| back to school on my budget. I can tell you right now: neither
| funny nor interesting.
|
| But for your curiosity, I chose women's tops because it's an
| item I buy, it represents a good portion of Goodwill sales
| (though I don't know how much), and it gives some consistent
| area for comparison more than if I was looking at, say,
| everything from old TVs to ceramic knick knacks.
|
| I'm pretty thrilled you read several paragraphs though, haha.
| aasasd wrote:
| Based on my bunch of visits to local second-hand shops (not the
| US), women's clothing overshadows the supply for men, so much
| so that those are basically 'women's second hand clothing
| stores'. And I'd easily expect tops to dominate the selection.
| war1025 wrote:
| My wife gets nearly all of her clothes and our kids clothes from
| Salvation Army. There seems to always be a good selection for
| that. Men's clothing is much harder to find second hand in my
| experience.
| imutemyteam wrote:
| Why are USED t-shirts selling at 8 dollars wtf??
| dahart wrote:
| Is the graph at the bottom showing volume of sales increasing, or
| lack of data before 2018? I didn't entirely understand the
| comments about gaps in data, what specifically is being referred
| to (e.g. the big dip in 2019, or the noise, or the 5x jump from
| 2017 to 2018?). While reading, I was wondering what the volume of
| sales were and if that explained price increases. If the volume
| really increased more than 10x, it'd be surprising if prices
| didn't go up even more than they did, right? But I guess volume
| didn't jump this big this fast?
|
| It might also be nice to adjust for inflation over the last
| decade, which hasn't been huge, but it makes a little difference
| in the price curves over time.
| aasasd wrote:
| Gaps might be due to the fact that scraping requires fiddling
| with the code every time the site changes even invisibly--or
| data just stops coming in.
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Can't answer conclusively. The big dip and the fall-off at
| the end were probably errors in my scraping. The site went
| down for a bit at a couple points, and the way dates were
| formatted changed a bit, all of which I thought I handled
| correctly but maybe not. And at a certain point of combing
| back over gaps, I just decided to be done.
|
| I strongly get the impression that sales volumes did increase
| from 2014 onward, but sales in 2014, particularly in the
| early range there, probably appear lower than they are. IDs
| in that range sometimes returned normal Goodwill item pages,
| and sometimes returned 404-type pages. Maybe they migrated
| systems or something around that time?
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Just fixed the typo on "disproportionately" that was pointed out,
| and the duplication/misspelling of Michigan as "Michigan."
|
| Will probably not address the other suggestions tonight and just
| chill.
|
| Thanks everyone for your interest! I honestly thought this would
| die in "new."
| tropdrop wrote:
| > _This project was done without Goodwill 's assistance or
| permission._
|
| May I ask about this - why no permission? Did you attempt to
| reach out to Goodwill to explain the kind of project you're
| embarking on and just didn't receive a response?
| tkeAmarktinClss wrote:
| Prices have gone up? Tell the federal reserve, I'm sure they will
| be shocked /s
|
| I don't think quality has anything to do with it. Employees are
| more expensive because life is more expensive.
| gandreani wrote:
| In the "Goodwill Tops by State Over Time" section, it seems like
| Missouri is skewing the scale when I select "Price relative to
| overall average".
|
| It's a shame I was really interested in that particular viz!
| sireat wrote:
| Quite a nice job on visualizations!
|
| This looks like all d3 or was there anything else you used?
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Aw shucks! It is indeed d3, and, as per the commenter below,
| uses very very lightly adapted tufte.css for layout.
| racl101 wrote:
| Agreed. Those are awesome visualizations.
|
| According to the Chrome console output they all appear to be D3
| visualizations.
| floatrock wrote:
| The way the layout uses the right margin for legends or
| auxillary information, or how the charts sometimes bleed into
| that space looks straight out of a Tufte book. :thumbsup:
| zeveb wrote:
| The (very attractive) charts do not display without JavaScript
| enabled. Surely this is a textbook example of where graceful
| degradation would come in handy, as a simple image without
| interactivity is still useful.
|
| Also the annotations, which are simple text, do not show up
| without JavaScript. This is even worse: if there is anything HTML
| is capable of doing, it is putting text on a screen!
| draw_down wrote:
| Perhaps the maker of award winning human.com is not
| particularly concerned with graceful degradation. Different
| people have different values, friend
| ayakura wrote:
| In the "Goodwill Tops by State Over Time" blocks there's a state
| called Michegan right above Michigan. Made me look up to see if
| it was called that at any point in the past, but it seems to be a
| typo :)
| jjmccoolguy wrote:
| Ahhhhhhhh, sorry mate, good catch. I'll fix after work. I'm
| Canadian if it gets me a little off the hook.
| [deleted]
| skuthus wrote:
| Didn't Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop' come out in 2016? Maybe this
| explains the price increase in 2016
| ajkjk wrote:
| more like 2012
| skuthus wrote:
| Ah yeah you're right
| sct202 wrote:
| I like they you have a section about data quality, but because
| this is only of things listed on their website there's going to
| be a lot of underlying bias of what was chosen to be listed on
| the website. There might be some kind of company policy that is
| driving the big shifts in # listings, brands that are considered
| good enough to put online, and price.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Angle I didn't see in your article: the price increases are a
| result of flipping finding true market value for an item. The
| ebay-et.al. effect.
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