Just fixed the typo on "disproportionately" that was pointed out, and the duplication/misspelling of Michigan as "Michigan."

Will probably not address the other suggestions tonight and just chill.

Thanks everyone for your interest! I honestly thought this would die in "new."

> This project was done without Goodwill's assistance or permission.

May I ask about this - why no permission? Did you attempt to reach out to Goodwill to explain the kind of project you're embarking on and just didn't receive a response?

Consider yourself lucky that I cut the over-long biographical introduction about my views on shopping and the effect of going back to school on my budget. I can tell you right now: neither funny nor interesting.

But for your curiosity, I chose women's tops because it's an item I buy, it represents a good portion of Goodwill sales (though I don't know how much), and it gives some consistent area for comparison more than if I was looking at, say, everything from old TVs to ceramic knick knacks.

I'm pretty thrilled you read several paragraphs though, haha.

Sorry, I was just vague. I scraped data for old listings around the site which seemed to go back to around 2014ish. Most data I collected last summer and over Christmas, and then it sat around for a long time.

Aw shucks! It is indeed d3, and, as per the commenter below, uses very very lightly adapted tufte.css for layout.

Can't answer conclusively. The big dip and the fall-off at the end were probably errors in my scraping. The site went down for a bit at a couple points, and the way dates were formatted changed a bit, all of which I thought I handled correctly but maybe not. And at a certain point of combing back over gaps, I just decided to be done.

I strongly get the impression that sales volumes did increase from 2014 onward, but sales in 2014, particularly in the early range there, probably appear lower than they are. IDs in that range sometimes returned normal Goodwill item pages, and sometimes returned 404-type pages. Maybe they migrated systems or something around that time?

You make some good points, I made some bad choices. To address: > Yes, I meant relative inside each state but phrased it poorly > With median price, I probably should have limited it to periods and states selling more than x items > And, yeah, Pennsylvania, and in particular the seller labelled "Goodwill Industries of North Central PA, Inc." dominates the market and should maybe have been excluded. I thought I'd get away with this by doing inner-state comparisons but it's still unideal

That sounds like a better article.

I do love all this conjecture on the titling (and your comment that women's clothing is an important subject helps me feel a bit validated in my time spent on this). I categorize it as weird because it's quite niche, there's no actual call to action or news story, and I spent waaaaay too much time on it.

Ha! I thought as much.

Women’s apparel is a 600B industry. It is highly segmented, and literal armies of people analyze category and product performance across millions of skus. So spending a lot of time on something like this is definitely not unusual.

It's really fun to see the moment people realize things like this exist outside their bubble of knowledge.

I had some first and second-hand knowledge around pricing household appliances. There's a common assumption that "the manufacturer says 'charge X'", the retailer charges X+Y% and you all go home happy. And you could not be further from the truth if you tried: pricing is an insanely complicated process with negotiation from both sides and monitored by an army of secret shoppers to keep both sides honest.

One of the reasons I like Hacker News is seeing all the people who will commit to days/weeks/months of work just to satisfy their curiosity. You’re in good company, this isn’t weird by HN standards.

fwiw, i think you can drop the '.com' from the title for a smoother punny title without ambiguity: "Goodwill.com Hunting" -> "Goodwill Hunting" since the movie is "Good Will Hunting". =)

Ahhhhhhhh, sorry mate, good catch. I'll fix after work. I'm Canadian if it gets me a little off the hook.

There's some (easy) analysis to be done to look at if these brands are coming only from only one or two Goodwill sellers, which could help us better form a theory. I might take a look after work. Even then, I didn't want to go too far down that particular rabbit hole since understanding might (shudder) require me to get off the internet and call someone or something.

I liked the visualizations a lot by the way. Maybe you mentioned in the write-up and I missed it, but what did you use to make them? Checked the skills listed on your CV but didn't see any not-static visualization tools listed

Thank you! I used d3.js, my first love.