Cliff Hartle wrote:
....
... people lost everything due to flooding. They had a big drive for
donated goods.

...saw people just dumping the junk that had accumulated in their basements. ...
I just thought of how much money someone was going to have to pay to haul
this junk to the landfill. ...

Yep, that's the scenario to a "T" but it doesn't happen only in drives,
it happens all the time.
As noted above, it was breaking the local SA to the point of either
support the secondhand store at the exclusion of most other charitable
work or fix the problem. Unfortunately, the only practical fix was to
close the secondhand collections and store.

As for second hand stores being more selective. They know what sells and
now that we have a consumer driven economy people are replacing more than
ever.

We've _always_ had a consumer-driven economy!

For the actual for-profit secondhand stores, it's easy for people to
understand their selectiveness in what they take. While nonprofits and
charities have different financial objectives, they have to operate in
a financially responsible manner or as in the example above they run
the very real risk of jeopardizing their primary mission.