“It was an experience. It was a real experience!”

That was the proclamation my mother-in-law, Linda Kay VanFossen, used to describe her first visit to the popular Goodwill Outlet store near Portland, Oregon. Known to locals as the “Bins,” this is where local Goodwill thrift store items come for a last ditch sale to the masses, delivered up for sale not in orderly rows grouped by styles and types like pants, skirts, shirts, blouses, and jackets, but dumped willy nilly into large bins for shoppers to dig through like the holiday sale tables of old.

Much later, as I understood her “experience” with the Bins much better, I realized I had experienced the magic of social media in action. It began in the first few seconds of our arrival. [Read more…]