Where Thrift Donation Processing Starts
Back Door to Floor, it's a stream to be managed
After nearly a decade in thrift, it continues to amaze and impress me how thrift professionals turn bags and boxes of random stuff into merchandised, organized profitable retail stores. It requires a level of creativity and flexibility not found in many businesses.
Part of the secret sauce of long-term success is processes and systems. Even creativity has to have a frame of reference.
Assuming enough donations are coming in, efficient ways to get stuff to the sales floor can be the difference between success and failure. At a minimum that efficiency or lack of directly affects the bottom line.
As soon as an item is donated it becomes an expense in space and time. It doesn’t stop until it’s left the building.
I know a store that has signs in production that say “In the door and on the floor in 24” meaning everything had to go to the floor that fast. Often a good idea, sometimes not advisable. Still, the idea of minimizing the time between the donation door and hitting the sales floor is good.
There are reasons to keep some items in the back of a warehouse for a time. Out-of-season goods can be a great example. The only way to have enough winter coats in the north is to save them as they are donated throughout the year.
Selling them retail in the summer is a losing proposition. Salvaging them gets pennies on the dollar versus selling them in season. So not all stored goods are bad.
Otherwise, the sooner an item is processed and on the sales floor the less it is likely to cost. The risk of losing its potential value is also minimized. For our purposes here, the focus is on the time between accepting a donation and it showing up on the sales floor.
Key considerations:
How many times an item is touched
How long an item spends being touched or worked on
How long it takes to get to the sales floor
It is interesting how much time items spend waiting between processes and how little time they are actually worked on.
Keep the stream moving
The donation stream is like a river with its tributaries running in reverse. The big river is incoming, and the smaller and smaller tributaries are the specific paths different goods follow.
Like a stream, removing rocks and minimizing meandering makes the flow easier, minimizing resistance.
The process of identifying what is in those random bags and boxes has to start somewhere. Usually, the best place for a first sort is at the donation point.
Some facilities do a minimum first sort, textiles, hard goods, maybe books and shoes. I have visited others who break down hard goods into smaller categories right away. Electronics, games and puzzles, home decor, glassware, and so on.
The more detail in a first sort the more time a donation attendant spends handling items. In low donation volume stores that may not be an issue. As the number of donations increases that can become logistically more difficult.
The first job of a donation attendant is always to be an ambassador to everyone kind enough to give away their stuff.
One way to facilitate the process is with proper tools.
I recently dropped off a whole SUV load of stuff at a well-known thrift store for a relative that was downsizing. The employee was prompt, friendly, positive, and helpful. As he started to unload I asked if he had a cart or something. He said no, so he and I hand carried a couple of dozen boxes into their back room. Some had books and dishes. With no equipment or processes evident, we put the boxes on the floor. I didn’t mind because it allowed me to see yet another thrift store back room.
Now someone will have to pick them up again and move them to wherever they belong.
There was a shocking lack of carts, totes, hand trucks, or other transportation tools. There were almost no tables for anyone to do work on. It looked a little third-world countryish back there with employees picking through seemingly random assorted bins and boxes.
A quick scan of the large open space didn’t surface any visible intentional product flow. No one seemed particularly happy to be there. To me, that was ironic as I know that their outward-facing mission is highly focused on technology.
There were plenty of people working there. They just didn’t have basic tools much less defined processes. I have been in this store on the sales floor in the past. It is never full, now I understand why.
Tools and equipment are purchased once and used for years.
Proper tools make a job so much easier and more efficient. Staff can more readily focus on moving goods to the floor or their final destination. Things move faster, injuries are limited. The river of goods flows.
The donation attendant's job shouldn’t just be stacking and restacking boxes. Given the proper tools and training, they can be major contributors to creating a winning flow of goods.
The donation attendant’s first sort should line up with the next step in the production process. That’s when the first split of the donation stream is working.
Keeping it basic we will assume the first sort into 5 categories, textiles, shoes, books, hard goods, and out-of-season saves. Ideally, there is a fixed station for the production of each of these product types with all of the tools needed to prep them for the floor.
When considering that first sort and what it flows into understand the skill set needed for each.
Books may require scanning each individually to determine the value and if they should be sold online. Shoes may require someone good at a little touch-up and clean-up to get the value back. Textiles require inspecting, hanging, and prepping differently.
Then there are hard goods, that catch all of everything else. Home decor, sporting goods, dishes, glasses, games books, and puzzles. Someone with some life experience and an eye for value is best at sorting through this random stuff.
Some operations have expertise in computers or electronics for example. In those cases, it can be more efficient to make those categories part of the first sort. The key is being very intentional about that sort.
The job of the team is to constantly look for rocks and unnecessary bends in the river that lead to the sales floor.
In donations, a big rock can be space available. Doing 5 initial sorts requires a bit of space, doing 7 or more, well, you get the idea. There is a point where the donation attendant is walking so far so often that the benefit is lost.
An example:
At one of my stores, the rolling racks where processors hung clothing were stored at the back of the warehouse. For reasons not related to processing it was a convenient place to keep them. One day a textile processor asked why they were so far away. We discovered that the sales floor staff putting away empty racks were walking some 50 steps past production areas to put them away. Producers were walking about the same every time they needed a rack. That store put out about 20 racks per day.
We moved the rack storage area into a line between the production area and the door to the sales floor.
It worked out to about 2,000 footsteps a day. Figuring three seconds per step, it added up to 100 minutes a day, every day. About 50 minutes a day to sales floor merchandising and the same to production.
That’s a very conservative 500 labor hours a year for one store. It had been set up that way since the store opened. It was just how it was done. It was an invisible expense until an employee asked why and someone listened.
This idea isn’t limited to merchandise.
In another store, the manager kept saying how long it took them to count down drawers and do daily deposits. With two or three registers that didn’t make sense. Eventually, I did a daily report there. The process they had was crazy. I couldn’t even wrap my head around how this system existed. We totally overhauled it and made some adjustments to the report that goes to accounting. We quickly cut an hour a day out of the process.
They had used this Byzantine system for so many years, it was so ingrained I got a lot of pushback. Normally I am about helping staff discover better ways. This was so bad, and I had so much experience with cash handling I set up their new system. They wanted a couple of tweaks which we made. After an adjustment period, they can’t believe how they used to do it.
Often wasted steps and wasted motions are like the leak in a hidden pipe. The water is being lost, and the water bill is higher, yet no one notices.
Line staff already know what’s wrong and often how to make their jobs easier. With both examples above, (and many more I could share) staff already saw where things seemed harder than they needed to be. They just wanted someone to truly listen which will facilitate improvements.
That’s the opportunity. Ask people doing work what would make that work easier. If it isn’t just passing work on to someone else and nothing seriously bad is likely to happen. Say yes. Get the equipment, facilitate moving something around, and change how a piece of software interacts. Whatever it is, just do it.
I love Undercover Boss. Every time they are amazed at how badly some things are done and how little power front-line staff have to make things better. Don’t let our business be that business.
Be careful, when people feel heard they speak up.