Lucienne Piontkowski hadn’t been in Goodwill for more than 10 minutes when something caught her eye.
It was a florescent lamp in the shape of a cocktail glass, nudged on a crowded shelf of lightly-used shades and bases.
“Everything here has a history,” she said, walking over to the lamp to look at the price. “You have to wonder how it got here, where it came from and who had it before.”
Piontkowski is a regular at the Concord Goodwill, where she comes at least twice a week and shops for more than two hours at a time.
Her routine begins in the toy section, where she looks for the Disney and Coca Cola figurines that her daughter collects. Then she moves on to the shelves of blown glass and teacups. Her favorite pieces are the furniture, like the velvet bar stand she bought for $20 one day.
“I like weird things, different things that make you walk into a place and say, ‘Wow,’ ” she said. “Sort of like conversational pieces.”
Piontkowski is one of the thousands of shoppers that visits Goodwill every week. Concord’s Goodwill saw 134,000 transactions last year.
Both in terms of items coming in and going out, business is good for Goodwill these days – 2017 was the second highest year in donations at Northern New England Goodwill’s 29 stores in New Hampshire, Maine and Northern Vermont with 47,065 donations.
Overall, donating and selling lightly-used goods is big business. Goodwill Industries International – with 3,200 stores and an online auction site – took in $5.7 billion in 2016.
Communications manager Heather Steeves said the uptick in donated goods – and all those sought after conversational pieces – has a lot to do with baby boomers going through their old belongings.
“It’s an aging generation in New Hampshire, and so a lot of them are downsizing and their kids aren’t able to take stuff,” she said. “Then, it ends up with us.”
A typical Goodwill store has sections for everything from electronics, like TVs and computers, to books, clothing, sheets, furniture and glassware.
Concord Goodwill supervisor Brittney Tinker said she was surprised at the diversity of items the store sees every day when she started working there 3½ years ago.
“I had been in retail before, but this blew my mind,” she said. “Even now, we get a lot of stuff in and I have no idea what it is. But then a customer will come in and say, ‘This is just what I was looking for.’”
Most loyal Goodwill shoppers can name a favorite item they found at the store.
For Caytlin Thompson of Tilton, it’s the handmade oval seaglass mirror she bought for her bedroom. For Linda Joyce of Concord, it’s a pair of nice floral curtains she got for $6.
What Tinker remembers most is a sterling silver monogrammed baby rattle from 1818 she found one day.
“It was so pretty,” she said. “It was like holding a piece of history in your hand.”
Almost all of what Goodwill sells comes from donations. Less than 5 percent is purchased, like socks and undergarments and seasonal goods like birdhouses.
Other products – the clothes, the couches and the toys – are brought in by droff-offs. At Concord’s Goodwill, people leave donations in the back of the store, where they can receive a tax deduction slip.
Then, the donations will go one of a few places. They may be stored in a box to be sold during a later season, like Christmas decorations, or get posted on an auction site if they’re valuable items, like gold. Some items will be sent to another store, if that location is experiencing a shortage in one particular item.
But Steeves said most of the stuff that gets dropped off in Concord will stay there. Even broken items, like cups, are resold at the store as crafting pieces.
“We try to keep things more local, because it’s more sustainable,” Steeves said.
Items stay on the store’s floor for about five weeks, and if they still don’t sell, they are sent by truck to the Buy the Pound outlet in Hudson.
“It’s sort of like a last chance for all of the stuff that doesn’t go in the other stores,” said Buy the Pound operations manager Jeremy Foy.
Merchandise that gets sent to Buy the Pound gets placed in the outlet in large, mixed bins, where people will sort through them for periods of 30 to 45 minutes.
Textiles are sold for $1.39 per pound and electronics for 20 cents a pound. Entire couches can go for as low as 25 cents.
For that reason, Buy the Pound can get busy. Foy said they’ve seen more than 1,000 customers on Saturdays.
Jeff Elliott of Hudson said he has come to Buy the Pound once a week for the past three years since it opened. He goes there to buy basic home items, like tupperware and cutlery.
“It’s kind of the same stuff every six months, but it’s good stuff,” he said. “It’s much more economical.”
Many people who shop at Buy the Pound run their own businesses and resell what they buy.
Connie and Henry Wisneski of Amherst shop there a few times a month for warm clothes and sleeping bags to donate to the Liberty House in Manchester.
“You can find Columbia and L.L. Bean and Carhart here – all the name brands” Connie said. “You just have to look for them.”
The items that don’t sell at the Buy the Pound outlet are not thrown away. The portion of donated Goodwill items that actually get thrown away is very slim.
Last year, Goodwill Northern New England reused or recycled 60 million pounds of stuff, diverting it from the waste stream.
Metal, clothing and cardboard are packed up in large bundles to be sold to retailers overseas.
Goodwill has a lot of local retailers they sell items to as well. There are artisanal ship builders, for example, that use rags made of flannel sheets. One retailer buys single shoes to try to find matches. Another buys wires to sell the copper from the inside.
“As long as it doesn’t end up in a waste stream, or in a landfill in Nashua, at the end of the day, we’re happy,” Steeves said.