Thrifting has gained popularity among students and teens, thanks to its sustainability and affordable nature. A popular place for students to thrift is the Goodwill Bins, which is a thrift store with rows of bins full of clothes, shoes and other items. After you dig around for a while and find what you want, you pay for what you want by the pound and by what type of item it is. For example, if you have two pounds of clothes, it would be around $3 per pound, or if you have four pounds of books, that would be about $1.50 per pound. There are two close locations in the Bay Area; one location is 35-45 minutes away in San Jose, while the other is 25-35 minutes away in San Francisco, but which is better?
Starting with the San Jose bins, while it is slightly further away, the bins opened May 2, 2025, making them a lot newer and more updated. The building itself is pretty large, with about five or six rows of bins containing about 12 full bins per row. The hours are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day, with bins rotating every 30-40 minutes.
One drawback to these bins is that they can get busy from time to time. When I went with my friends, it wasn’t too busy, but it was sort of difficult to fit into the crowd of people waiting to be able to start digging through the bins. Since the bins are left outside, items get wet when it rains, but still are brought into the building for people to dig into.
On the other hand, the San Francisco bins have been open for much longer, but it’s unclear as to when they opened; the earliest review I could find was from 2020. The location of these bins is in South San Francisco, right next to the 101 highway and near the SFO airport. The bins rotate only twice a day, and there are significantly less bins than the San Jose Goodwill. While the San Jose bins have five or six rows of bins, the San Francisco bins only have three rows, with about four or five full bins in each row.
Overall, the San Jose Goodwill bins are much nicer since they are newer, and also have a lot more bins full of clothes, shoes, and other items. In the warehouse that the San Francisco bins are in, only about one-fourth of it is being used for the bins, making it very compact with only a little bit of room for people to dig through the bins.
After visiting both, the San Jose Goodwill bins are better than the San Francisco ones due to the nicer and larger set up. If environment or size isn’t an important factor, the quality of the clothes is about the same between the two, so that’s not a big factor to worry about. However, there is definitely more clothes at the San Jose bins since it is larger with more rows and bins.
If you are looking to go to the Goodwill bins, I would definitely recommend the San Jose ones since they have more bins and therefore have more variety and make it more likely for you to find something you like.
