10/17/2025
https://www.facebook.com/share/1CKpJr6CpG/?mibextid=wwXIfr
“The Penguin’s Mother Strikes Again”
So my buddy messages me earlier and tells me this wild story. He’s outside of a Goodwill loading stuff into his truck, right? He’s got a few signs on the back of it saying what kind of stuff he’s looking for, just basic reseller hustle stuff.
Out walks this short, round lady, looked like the Penguin’s mom from Batman Returns, cigarette in hand, attitude on full blast. She waddles up to him and goes, “What are you, some kind of reseller?”
He goes, “Yeah, and?”
She squints, tilts her head, and says, “You’re stealing from the poor. You must feel real good about yourself, huh?”
He said he just stared at her for a second and said, “Lady, I just bought two vinyl records and a crewneck sweatshirt from Goodwill. You think I’m out here stealing from the poor, but the truth is Goodwill is the biggest reseller on the planet. They get their stuff for free and still charge people like you fifteen bucks for a stained hoodie.”
That’s what cracks me up. People like her, mostly that boomer generation, love to act like resellers are the problem. They’ve got this built-in superiority complex where anything they don’t personally understand is automatically evil. But here’s the thing, Goodwill is a corporation, not a charity yard sale. They’ve turned donations into a billion dollar business model while paying their employees peanuts. Yet somehow, we’re the ones “stealing from the poor”?
Nah. What’s really happening is people like her just don’t like seeing someone else finding opportunity where they only see trash. She wasn’t mad because he bought something, she was mad because he’s out there doing something she never had the guts to try.
Let’s be real, the odds that a poor person was coming in right after him specifically to buy the exact same two vinyls and a random crewneck are about one in a million. There are hundreds of thousands of items in those stores. If you think resellers are taking food off someone’s plate because they flipped an old record, you’ve lost the plot completely.
It’s not stealing from the poor to see value where others don’t. What’s stealing from the poor is pretending a billion dollar thrift chain is still some selfless charity when they’re marking up free donations and laughing all the way to the bank.