You want them out of the house — now. The once-worn sweaters, the age-old handbags, the threadbare jeans — sometimes even the wrong-size blouse or wrong-color slacks with the tags still on. You cram them into plastic garbage bags along with the barely broken toys, the almost complete set of dishes, the newly obsolete electronics and the untouched gifts.
And you donate them to one of the many nonprofit thrift stores that make Denver among the most competitive markets in a rapidly changing industry.
What happens to them after that is the story of refurbished stores, an expanding customer base and a trickle-down trail of secondary buyers and sellers. Along the way, thrift stores wring every possible cent from donations that these days could well end up in the closet of a neighbor — or just as easily land a continent away.
“This isn’t your grandmother’s thrift store,” says Ric Berninzoni, Goodwill’s vice president of retail operations, as he stands in the organization’s year-old outlet in a circa 1905 J.C. Penney building at 21 S. Broadway.
These days, the larger thrifts like Goodwill and arc Thrift Stores may have more in common with the venerable retailer than with the musty shops of the past. They’re brighter and cleaner, their merchandise reflects the neighborhood demographics — they even smell better.
And as the economy has tanked, their popularity has risen, with more middle-class and even upscale clientele — and higher sales as well.
Reinventing thrift stores
“These are unprecedented times,” says Berninzoni, noting a 44 percent increase in Goodwill’s thrift revenue since 2005 in the Denver and northern Colorado region. “Our increases in the last three or four months have been exceptional.”
Larger stores now perceive their competition as not only other thrift stores, but also retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kmart, Big Lots and Ross.
“There’s a trend to create a nicer environment and a better experience,” says Lloyd Lewis, CEO of the state’s 18 arc Thrift Stores, which help fund advocacy for people with disabilities. “That’s what we’ve been doing, with a fair amount of success.”
Arc’s Colorado thrift-store operation has doubled in the past four years and seen a revenue bump of 15 percent to 20 percent over the past three years, he says.
The Salvation Army, another of the larger nonprofit players in the Colorado thrift-store industry, saw a 10 percent to 12 percent uptick in business over the previous summer, but sliding revenue since then has prompted some program cuts.
The Salvation Army, whose programs address drug and alcohol addiction, has embraced an image overhaul for its retail locations, right down to dropping “thrift store” from the name. A location that recently opened in Colorado Springs is called a “family store,” as will be two more slated to open in late 2009 in Parker and Lafayette.
“We’re certainly trying to expand,” says Salvation Army business administrator Tim Tomasso. “We take some different tacks, but we end up with more retail space, more convenient locations, better customer service.”
Smaller thrift stores, such as Cajun’s Closet in Lakewood, also have noticed a lot of new faces — even if they’ve caught the shopping bug elsewhere.
“Since I’m small, all the new thrift-store shoppers go to arc, Goodwill — the big shiny places,” says manager Dawn Risner, whose store supports the Cat Care Society. “The smaller thrift stores they come across by chance later on, after they’ve been thrift-store shopping a little bit longer.”
Sales have been good at the Flatirons Habitat Thrift Store in Broomfield. And while manager Erik Brack acknowledges that it’s hard for a store such as his to compete with the bigger outlets, business has been strong enough to warrant a 4,000- square-foot expansion.
“It’s always been a competitive market,” says Brack, whose store helps support Habitat for Humanity. “The difference now is that the big thrift operators are suddenly paying more attention and reinvesting in their stores. So we’ve done it too.”
Flow of merchandise
At Goodwill’s South Broadway store, one of 18 in Denver and northern Colorado, workers in a 5,000-square-foot basement processing area determine what will sell and for how much.
Training and market research play big roles, and some aspects of the process are proprietary in such a competitive environment, Berninzoni says.
For Goodwill, the flow of merchandise goes roughly like this: 70 percent of what’s on the floor sells in the first week; prices for items still on the floor by the fourth week go to 50 percent off for one more week.
Those items that still don’t sell go to Goodwill’s “99 cent” store.
After three weeks there, merchandise goes to auction. What doesn’t sell at auction goes to salvage or recycling, with as little as possible going into the trash. Denver-area stores recycled 44 million pounds of plastic, metal and glass last year, according to Berninzoni.
A new kind of customer
Upstairs at the glittery Broadway store, Karen Fisher, 47, browses the racks. It’s been a decade since she shopped thrifts with her teenage daughter, searching for great deals on designer labels.
Now she shops for herself. Fisher holds up a hanger bearing a Donna Karan vest for $3.
“I consider myself pretty fashion-conscious,” she says. “Thrift stores are a good way to try out a new trend.”
The hardwood floors, the lighting, even the remarkable absence of that mildewy, thrift-store smell (note the eight air fresheners positioned unobtrusively around the store) turn her focus to the merchandise, not its origins.
“I could shop Cherry Creek — and I do,” Fisher says. “But the hunt is more interesting.”
For Fisher, like many customers, clothing represents the greatest “find.” And for thrift stores, clothes represent about half of all sales.
Workers generally clean up shoes and discard soiled clothing, but laundering is cost-prohibitive.
In the back room of the Goodwill store, Berninzoni points to the bar codes that workers have affixed to each piece of merchandise.
“This is a very refined business,” he says. “We want to know what sells. Some locations are better kids’ stores, or ladies’ or men’s stores. When we open one, we set it up appropriately according to demographics.
“It’s not just get-it-in, put-it-out.”
Stormy Walker, who manages the sprawling Disabled American Veterans thrift store in a former Lakewood roller rink, recently walked past a bin of shoes ready to be put on display.
Then something caught her eye: two brand names that resonated from the hit TV series, “Sex In the City” — Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. By her reckoning, these particular designer models fetched between $500 and $1,000 new.
Instead of throwing them on a rack with the run-of-the-mill brands, Walker put them in the glass display case at the front of the store, along with a pair of Vuittons.
She priced them at $149 a pair.
“If you know what you’re looking at, and know what it costs, you’ll buy it,” Walker figures. “We don’t get a lot of exceptionally high-end merchandise, but when we do, it doesn’t last long.”
She estimates that sales at the DAV thrift store are up as much as 2 percent over last year, but notes that as Goodwill and arc have renovated and expanded, shops like hers have dipped under the radar, relatively speaking.
But there’s still a market.
“The concept of a thrift store for poor people is gone,” Walker says. “We see a lot of moms, office ladies buying designer clothes.”
But a multitude of other buyers sift through the vast amount of merchandise left behind by metro-area shoppers.
Sometimes stores deal unsold items to outfits looking for a particular commodity, anything from clothing to shoes to flower vases.
But the larger thrift stores hold auctions — events that more closely resemble a large-scale grab bag of castoff items that didn’t sell in the stores.
Salvaging the rest
By 8 a.m. on a recent day, Della Torrez, Goodwill’s manager of auctions and bulk, has scribbled orders onto a sheet of paper as customers pull their pickups, some dragging trailers, into the lot outside a 100,000-square-foot warehouse on Federal Boulevard.
The customers, many from Mexico, pay cash for large boxes of assorted merchandise. A box of “hard lines” that can include anything from toys to electronics to purses, backpacks and knickknacks costs $20. A large box of discarded clothing runs $50, a smaller box $40.
The buyers sift through the boxes, pulling out items they figure they can sell elsewhere and loading them into their trucks. The flea markets in El Paso and across the border in Juarez are two popular destinations.
Willi Maciel and his son, Willi Jr., have trekked to Denver from Mexico and, on this particular day, have purchased 15 boxes of hard lines for $20 each, a $300 investment.
They find a TV, then a vacuum. Lots of stuffed animals in good condition.
“Today,” says the elder Maciel, “is good.”
He estimates that he and his son will sell almost a third of the items they select to customers in El Paso. The rest they’ll truck to Juarez.
Estimated profit: $1,000.
That’s not counting the benefit of items they pull from the boxes and determine to keep for themselves — like a sewing machine.
“For my wife,” says the elder Maciel, smiling broadly.
Much of what doesn’t sell here, particularly clothing, becomes part of a multimillion-dollar salvage business. Giant baling machines in the warehouse compress old shirts, pants, anything made of cloth into rock-solid 1,000-pound blocks bound with cardboard and wire.
These are loaded onto trucks — five or six semi-trailers holding 43 bales each leave Goodwill every week. From Denver, they head for “sorting houses” on the coasts, where they’re sold to salvagers for a negotiated price ranging from 10 to 15 cents a pound.
Some of the clothing gets sold to other thrift stores. The rest is loaded onto ships, often bound for Third World countries. This is how a T-shirt emblazoned with “Broncos Super Bowl Champs” winds up on a kid in the Bolivian countryside.
“What the industry has done over time is make sure everything that’s done generates proceeds,” says arc’s Lewis. “We’ve developed ways to ensure that practically nothing is wasted and that donations benefit charity.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com
