How we work

Thrift Good does, directly. Your things are collected by us, taken to our own site, and sorted by our own team. They are not bought from us by another company, and they are not collected on behalf of a charity you have not heard of.

We do. Our trucks carry our name, and the crew are ours. The pickup service is called Pickup for Good by Thrift Good — it is a name for the service, not a separate company. There is no third party between you and us.

Every item ends up in one of four places, and we record which:

• Sold in a store or online, where the money funds charitable work.
• Given directly to someone who needs it, where that does more good than selling it.
• Sent to a textile or materials recycler, when it cannot be reused.
• Disposed of, when it is unsafe or contaminated. This costs us money.

By expected value, not by guesswork. For each item we weigh what a channel realistically pays, how likely it is to sell at all, the fees, the shipping, the staff time to photograph and list it, and how long it sits in storage first.

It is a recommendation, never an automatic action. Anything valuable, uncertain, luxury or collectible is priced by a person before it goes anywhere. The longer explanation is here.

Collecting, sorting and selling donated goods is not free, and reporting gross revenue as though it were impact would overstate what your donation did. The costs we account for:

• Fuel, vehicle and crew time for the collection itself.
• Staff time to sort, grade, clean, photograph and list.
• Marketplace commission and payment processing.
• Shipping, where we pay it.
• Storage, for as long as an item is unsold.
• Disposal of anything that cannot be used.

What is left after those is what we call net proceeds, and it is the only figure we will ever describe as what a donation raised.

We do not have an honest number yet, because we have only just started collecting. When we do, it will be published on our impact page with the costs shown rather than quietly netted off, and traceable back to specific records.

If you ever see a percentage from us that we cannot trace to our own ledger, that is a mistake and we want to know about it.

We are not able to answer that yet, and we would rather say so than guess. Our legal and fiscal structure is still being settled, and until it is we make no claim about tax status anywhere on this site.

What we can tell you is what we will always do: give you a dated written record of what we received, and never put a dollar value on it. Determining value is the donor’s responsibility under US tax rules, and a number we invented would carry no weight. Our receipt policy explains this properly.

Thrift Good is being built as a social enterprise within the UMMA Foundation family. The formal relationship between the two is still being settled, and we will say precisely what it means for you once it is — including on this page.

We are new. Our first site is in Staten Island. Nothing on this site describes a scale we do not have.