By Bethany Cartledge and Shannon Rockwell

We at St. Vinnie’s applaud Eugene Weekly for the entertaining and altogether worthwhile thrifting edition published on May 8. As the area’s largest thrift operation with seven locations in Eugene-Springfield, we might be a little biased, but we sure love it when other people get as excited as we do about all the financial, social and environmental benefits of thrifting and reuse!

We also love to explain how we’re much more than a thrift store, and how we stretch the value of every purchase and donation to provide supportive resources for more than 35,000 neighbors in need every year. Revenue from our 14 Oregon stores and one used-car lot cover a portion of annual operating costs for St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County (SVdP), this area’s largest nonprofit human-services provider.

As such, we give great consideration to how we price everything in our stores — balancing the needs to bring value to our customers, responsibly steward the donations we receive and generate ongoing financial support for our critical community programs. So when we read the May 8 story on second-hand furniture, “I Like What You’ve Done with the Place,” we were disappointed at the suggestion that we overprice some furniture in our stores.

The many human services we provide also rely in large part on grants and fundraising, beyond the base of operating support from our store revenue. But it’s not a stretch to say that our affordable-housing program, homeless and emergency shelters, veterans’ programs and other essential services depend on St. Vinnie’s shoppers, who also enable us to give away hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing, furniture and housewares vouchers every year to families in need.

And while we are a nonprofit, we must run our business smartly and strategically in order to sustain the wide variety of services and jobs we provide. These include many second-chance employment opportunities for those with traditional barriers to being hired elsewhere, and those hard-working members of our warehouse and distribution teams who make it possible for so much quality material to make its way to your neighborhood St. Vinnie’s.

The higher-priced items referenced are among the new and nearly new home furnishings we procure from high-end retailers, and not at no cost to us, as many assume. SVdP has custom-tailored logistics relationships with several upscale retailers and pays the freight to ship truckloads of their surplus — overstocks, floor models, customer returns, etc. — from across the country to our central warehouse in Eugene. Our staff then lightly repair, assemble and/or refurbish items as needed before distributing them among our stores for sale. While they can’t be sold as “new,” and we can’t advertise the names of the retailers, these are essentially unused and mostly not even preowned products.

You’ll see the companies sell these same items new for at least twice, and often three to four times our price. Our pricing might initially seem high if you’re not expecting it in a thrift-store setting, but these aren’t typical thrift-store items. 

Many buyers also recognize the substantial discount from retail prices and are thrilled to find these items in our stores. We try to honor the quality of the products through our pricing, and realize some return for our staff’s invested time and the cost of transporting them long distances (diverting from landfills in the process).

All that said, these prices only apply to certain star attraction-type stock that comes from those name-brand retailers. Our stores are full of other typical preowned and donated items, which are priced accordingly lower and, we think, favorably when compared to other thrift and resale shops.

We do our best to provide great value to our customers and the community. We strive to have a mix of price points within our products to accommodate those on limited incomes, and we prioritize improving access to affordable materials for residents in every community we serve, particularly small rural markets.

We just ask that the next time you find yourself pondering the price of a purchase at any of our stores, please consider all the effort that went into making the product available to you; all the people you’re helping to employ in our stores and warehouses; and all the good your purchases will do here in your community.

Bethany Cartledge is executive director of St. Vincent de Paul Society of Lane County, and Shannon Rockwell is director of stores operations for the agency’s St. Vinnie’s retail-thrift stores.