The first thing a visitor to Goodwill Central Coast’s Salinas headquarters notices is its sheer size. The 98,000-square-foot warehouse has 21 loading docks, and trucks come and go daily, delivering donated goods from over a dozen locations. Goods are sorted, priced and tagged, then shipped out daily to stores, which receive new secondhand goods every day.
Opened in 2017 at a cost of $16 million, this warehouse serves a three-county region (Monterey, Santa Cruz and San Luis Obispo), along a 160-mile stretch. The region includes 14 stores and two outlets, at the Salinas hub and another, smaller warehouse in San Luis Obispo.
This facility, combined with the explosion of online retail sales, have enabled Goodwill to grow. When Alan Martinson, vice president of retail and e-commerce, started in 2016, there were about 220 employees. Today, there are 575.
That includes a team of 26 people who handle e-commerce, which is the first prospective stop for incoming donations of clothing, books, records and home goods. In the past year, Goodwill Central Coast staff have prepared 8.9 million items for sale.
The most valuable stuff goes upstairs for e-commerce, where a team photographs and posts items on a range of platforms like eBay and Amazon, and also at shopgoodwill.com. On a recent day, the searchable site shows some of what’s available in Salinas, with a week left to bid: a Hermes silk scarf for $201, an 18-karat gold necklace for $311, a Dutch oven for $26, a mandolin for $89. On Nov. 15, they sold a Rolex watch for $4,001.
“The best stuff goes to e-commerce,” Martinson explains. “The second-best stuff goes to the stores. If a store can’t sell it, then it goes to the outlets, then to salvage.”
The salvage operation includes a wood-chipper, compactors and balers, that transform unwanted stuff into industrial goods. Books may go by the trailer-load to publishers who repulp the paper; bales of clothing to manufacturers of shredded composite that gets used in products like pads under brake pedals in cars.
There are two outlets, one of which is located here at the Salinas warehouse. Shoppers are here for deeply discounted goods that didn’t sell at a store, even after weekly markdowns. They rummage through big bins of clothing or furniture, sold for $2.49/pound, or appliances that are missing parts. (There are, of course, some treasures.)
Revenue from all of these sales – over $35 million a year, according to forms filed with the IRS – goes back into running the stores, as well as Goodwill’s workforce program, which is really the nonprofit’s underlying purpose. “The whole mission is centered around removing barriers to employment,” Martinson says.
There are separate divisions, workforce reentry programs and the hundreds of people employed in the stores, but those sometimes overlap. Roshann Smith enrolled in Goodwill’s Organizational Work Program in 2015, available to people on CalWorks. She had experience working at a Carl’s Jr., but had been out of the workforce raising her children for 10 years at the time she was trying to get a job. She and her kids moved back to her hometown, Marina, where she helped her mom recover from a heart attack. “I was trying to get back on track in my personal life,” she says. “Goodwill helped me change my life. I needed to get off welfare and step up.”
After OWP, she landed a job in the Seaside Goodwill store, and now, eight years year, still works there as a lead sales associate.
In her first six-month review, Smith says she got schooled on customer service. Now it’s second nature for her to chat with customers. “They are here for retail therapy,” she says. “If they leave my register with a smile, then I’m rocking and rolling.”