In The New York Times Magazine: Goodwill

GOODWILL HUNTING:
Rebranding castoffs as couture — or at least as competitive with Wal-Mart.

This week in Consumed:

In the first eight months of 2008, sales at Goodwill stores in the United States and Canada increased by 7 percent over the same period last year. While that obviously runs counter to trends being reported by most retailers these days, it’s hard to say whether it counts as good news that more people are evidently buying secondhand goods. After all, many of us probably don’t think of Goodwill in terms of retail; we think of it in terms of charity.

But operators of some Goodwill stores have been making efforts to prod us to think a little differently, or perhaps more expansively, about the brand — and quite possibly the present economic gloom has primed us to be more open to that idea….

Read the column in the November 2, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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