Let this be a cautionary anecdote ladies, gentlemen, and all. I want to caution anyone reading this to avoid Goodwill like the plague, both in regards to employment and shopping, if it can be helped.
So, I'm a Cashier with Goodwill (at least until I quit, as they certainly don't have the manpower to fire me). My job description, as is plainly iterated and reiterated both verbally and in writing, is to assist customers by ringing up their purchases, as well as ensuring the sales floor is stocked and well put-together. What my job is not is all of the oftentimes laborious and unforgiving work of a Donation Attendant.
So imagine my surprise when the manager who writes the schedule intercepts me as I'm going to clock in.
She hands me a pair of work gloves and tells me: “You're going to be a D.A today!”
Immediately, she can see the way I blanch, and launches into a nearly panicked series of false reassurances about how 'easy' the work is. Never mind the catastrophic turnover rate, poor working conditions, and lack of instruction.
The lattermost issue was the worst of the bunch – I was expected to effectively participate in a job I had zero training for, and minimal training was afforded to me in the brief few minutes my manager spent explaining the work before pushing me into the fray. The only positive experience I can say I gained from the experience was, arguably, coming to have a more intimate knowledge of the level of carelessness and disdain the store managers held for their own work.
Items are strewn about on the floor with no regard for tripping hazards, even the most basic standards for cleanliness (dusting things down, ensuring items aren't egregiously dirty) are ignored, and workers are routinely swamped with a veritable mountain of poorly processed items and donations. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing in place to help ameliorate the constant flow of items for the employees.
I got through about two hours of my shift before I decided that enough was enough. This was not in my job description, I had been given no explicit indication that I would ever be doing anything of this nature, and the conditions were so reviling to me that it would have been an affront to my own humanity to stick around.
So I took my break, conjured a lie that my mother had taken some kind of catastrophic fall, and took my leave. Now I'm genuinely thinking I might simply find some other form of employment.
I don't really know what good this story does – maybe it can provide some small vicarious catharsis, maybe it can be a very brief insight into a superficially-nice 'charity' and its heinous practices, or maybe it's just funny. Either way, if it can make even a few people think twice about thrifting at Goodwill, I will have felt satisfied.