How do you find anything good at Goodwill? Whenever I go into one, all I find is a lot of junk. I can’t believe you find anything good there.

There are a few basic tactics that you should use if you’re shopping at Goodwill.

1. First, visit Goodwills that are located in upscale areas. Don’t visit the Goodwill in the poor part of town or even the medium income part of town. In Houston Piney Point or The Heights have the best Goodwill. You tend to find much better types of things and quality of donation BUT  you may have to pay for a little bit more.
2. Second, be picky. If you go into a Goodwill that seems to mostly be full of junk, you don’t have to buy that junk. Walk out and put that one on your “avoid in the future” list.However, having said that, there are a lot of gems to be found, particularly in areas of income disparity. A college town is a perfect example of this. A college town often has a wide variety of incomes and perceptions of money, which means that their Goodwill stores tend to include a lot of cheap stuff and a fair amount of good stuff.You often have to dig for those gems, though. What I often do is look for examples of high-quality things, even if I’m not particularly interested in buying them. If I see some high-quality items, even if they’re not perfect for me, I know that there are some diamonds hidden in the piles here.
3. If I don’t find anything that seems of reasonable quality, or if I only find maybe one item in forty or fifty that looks worthwhile, I leave the store and often don’t look back.

The trick is to investigate lots of Goodwill stores. You should fully expect that some of them are going to be of poor quality and not worth visiting again. With Goodwill you also need to take into consideration that everything cost the same in the isles. So if you find a dress it’s 9.99. If it was from Old Navy or  Stella McCartney  at Goodwill it will be 9.99.