A woman who bought a glass vase for $3.99 at a local Goodwill charity shop has seen the piece auctioned off for more than $100,000 after it turned out to be a rare and valuable piece of Italian glassware.
Jessica Vincent had bought the item at a Goodwill thrift store in Hanover county, Virginia, and had an inkling that it might have been worth a little more than was usual, she told the New York Times.
“I had a sense that it might be a $1,000 or $2,000 piece, but I had no clue how good it actually was until I did a little bit more research,” she told the paper after noticing a small ‘M’ on its bottom which she suspected might stand for Murano, an Italian island near Venice famed for glasswork.
I looked at their 2022 990 and their CEO made 600k, which for an organization doing $61m in business is on the very low end. I see 3.5m to 13 paid employees of Goodwill.
There are ICs associated and I'm not interested in delving into that right now, but I don't have any information available right now to say the CEO of Goodwill is making a buttload.
Paying an autistic employee peanuts is deplorable, but hopefully a one-off by some CEO wannabe/neverbe who thinks he knows how to do business.
I'm all about calling out "charitable" organizations, but the first thing I do is check their 990. And I'll be completely honest, this may just be one branch of Goodwill's larger umbrella, but it's probably a decent example with 61m in revenue. I'm sitting in a cabana at Kalahari while my two year old eats a bar so I'm phoning it in, literally.