High probability those second hand items will be worn once to a special event then donated again. Rinse and repeat.
My countertop microwave oven died a few days ago. Went by a local thrift store that I rarely visit and found a GE model from 2021 that is still selling on Amazon for $317.
Price $7.50
Tax $0.75
Tip $0.25
Tot $9.00
Most of my clothes came from either thrift stores, or my church’s rummage sale, which amounts to about the same thing.
Anything other than clothes is pretty hit-or-miss. If you’re at the thrift store anyway, you might as well look, but you often won’t find anything worthwhile, and you certainly can’t say “I want to buy X”, and count on being able to find it.
Good find, but how did 7.5+.75+.25 add up to 9, rather than 8.5?
You’re right. I tipped $0.75
I live near a thrift store that supports a pet rescue group and has a fitting room (not all of them do). I try to buy shirts/blouses, jeans, and other pants from there before buying somewhere else. If a store doesn’t have a fitting room, I mostly buy shirts (can usually guess if they will fit or be slightly too big, which is fine) and books. Maybe an appliance or furniture item if we were looking for something specific.
Microwaves are great at thrift stores, I’m not going to look back to see if I mentioned this 2 years ago, but the AirBnB we rented in Manhattan didn’t have a microwave, so we bought up at the thrift store a block or so away for something like $7 and left it after we used it for a month. Like you we also bought one when our real microwave died. Not a great replacement, but it served until we replaced the built-in one.
You know, I used to know an old lady who loved thrift shopping. Every weekend like clockwork she’d go to Goodwill or Value Village or some other little place and go hunting for clothes and jewelry and other rare finds. She had the strangest luck, though - every single haul she brought home, no matter what, at least one of the items would be haunted. Coat, shoes, hat, necklaces, rings, whatever - no matter what it was, it’d have some kind of restless spirit attached to it that’d show up any time she put them on.
At first it startled her a lot, but she got used to it. Turns out, the ghosts weren’t evil or anything - they were just bored and lonely, and they were kinda relieved that someone could actually see and hear them. And as for herself, she didn’t have many friends left at her age, so she appreciated the company. So when she’d go for her daily walk every morning, she’d dress head to toe in her haunted clothes and bring the ghosts walking with her. It was like having her own little social circle.
And over time, the ghosts got to chatting amongst themselves and realized they had a lot in common. They’d all been born and spent their lives in the same town, which was also where the old lady lived, and though they’d all died at different ages, they’d all been born around the same time.
So they got to thinking, there must be something we have in common that’s resulted in us being stuck here, and they start trying to figure out what it is. They didn’t go to the same school, or work in the same place, or run in the same circle of friends or anything, but after weeks of comparing notes they realized that each of them, at some point in their lives, had had a heated dispute with this woman they only knew as “Old Bernadette”. Old Bernadette lived alone in this rundown house on the edge of town, and she was an absolute grouch who was quick to anger and held grudges.
“That explains it!” one of the ghosts exclaimed. “Old Bernadette must have been a witch! And so she cursed us and bound our spirits to these clothes so we couldn’t pass on to the next world. She must be dead by now since she was already pretty old back then. And when she died, whatever family she had must have donated all her old clothes to the thrift shops, where our friend bought them.”
Of course, a witch’s curse can only be undone by the witch herself, and since she was dead, there was nothing they could do about it. One of them proposed that maybe burning the clothes would set them free, but they all enjoyed hanging out with the old lady so much that they weren’t really in any hurry to move on.
Anyway, one day a few months later the old lady was needing some caffeine during her morning walk, so she stopped into Starbucks to order a latte. The barista was a young lady with a goth look to her, and as she was placing her order, the ghosts started commenting that she looked familiar, even though she must’ve been too young for any of them to have known her.
And as the old lady is sitting down waiting for her order, one of them figures it out. “She looks just like Old Bernadette did in some pictures I saw once! That must be her granddaughter.”
And just then the barista calls the old lady’s name, and as she heads for the counter, she looks the barista right in the eyes and tells her;
I wear your grandma’s foes
I look incredible
I’m in this haunted coat
From that thrift shop down the road
Shaggy dog story? I don’t get it.
It’s a play on the song Thrift Shop by Macklemore.
Thank you!
I’ve noticed that most of the stuff that I’d otherwise want to buy at a thrift store seems to be skimmed off the top and auctioned online on eBay or Shopgoodwill for much more money than they’d get in a brick and mortar store. Stuff like old binoculars, cameras, other electronics or interesting stuff is all sold online.
Our local thrift stores are primarily musty old clothes and junky housewares. If you want a weird coffee mug from some corporate event, or a Cretaceous-era crock-pot, they’re the place to go.
The thrift store experience definitely changed in the internet age. Now you have people who make their living getting first crack at the good stuff to sell online. I’ve got some nice mid-century modern furniture that I got for cheap back before 2000. To this day I regret not buying a coffee table for $10 that I didn’t have room for at the time. It looked something like this and would be priced out of my range now. And it would have worked perfectly in the house I bought a couple years later.
True. I mostly meant that if someone brings in say… an old camera and a bunch of lenses for donation, someone at Goodwill/Salvation Army/etc… will immediately take that and post it on eBay or Shopgoodwill on behalf of their organization, where it’ll be sold at whatever the market rate is for that item. Which in the case of old cameras, can be surprisingly high.
Most of the good stuff never sees the shop floor at all.
Despite living in a relatively small regional town (around 15k residents) we’ve been blessed with six (what we call) Op Shops, or Opportunity shops. Some are more expensive than others, but you can pick up some amazing bargains. I’m a regular visitor to 3 of the shops, sometimes just to browse, other times when I need something specific. 90% of my clothes come from the op shop, along with furniture, electrical goods and haberdashery! I recently scored some brand new linen dish-towels for $1 each, couldn’t knock those back.
Oh, and when I can fit no more clothes in my closet, I do a purging and donate it all back to the op shop to recycle it again.
This has me laughing out loud! 
Same in the UK; when I was a kid, what we know as charity shops barely seemed to sort things at all. You could get real bargains as well absolute tat, all muddled in together. Then when the internet age really started kicking off the shops opened their own ebay accounts and similar, and the best stuff got skimmed off and sold on there at higher prices - I volunteered in a local bookshop, all the records or anything really interesting was sold online, though at least they were open about it to donors[1]. All the bigger places realised they could make more money by doing the same, and just stopped selling bargains in store at all. Soon it was only places like the local cat sanctuary with one shop run by Doris, age 85 who doesn’t trust the internet, that still had the random mix.
Now as you say, most people just sell their own things online and aside from a few shops that do stuff like wardrobes, which are not worth the hassle to sell online, there’s rarely much worth buying. Even Doris never has a proper leather jacket (lightly coated in cat hair) for £5 any more.
It used to feel like they were partly supporting the charity, partly giving the local community opportunities to get good quality stuff at low prices; now it’s just a fundraiser. It’s still useful to get cheap and cheerful stuff, say for a student flat, and environmentally it beats buying new and chucking it out if you just need something temporarily, but I don’t remember last time I found anything exciting in one.
I remember the record guy at one I was at spending a whole day trying to track down the donor of a signed record with an estimated value of a couple of thousand to check she knew what she was giving- yes, she did, it was her late husband’s and he had been a big supporter of the organisation ↩︎
I don’t think it’s really people selling their own stuff here, but rather when they donate it, they have someone picking the donation intake over for stuff they can sell on an online auction site for bigger money.
For example, if I was to donate an old Canon WP-1 point-and-shoot film camera from the mid-90s to Goodwill, I’d guarantee someone would swoop in and sell it on Shopgoodwill.com, where it would likely sell for $70-ish, instead of letting someone at the local Goodwill price it at $5 and put it on the floor.
Which is fine with me; I don’t expect charities to give me stuff for a song; just a fair price. And these days, the best way to get that fair price on both sides is some sort of online auction.
But it means that the actual retail locations are almost by definition going to be chock full of crap that they can’t actually sell online for more money. Sometimes there are still deals when the informed picker-person doesn’t realize something’s worth money, but generally they’re needles in haystacks.
That is a pretty side table. It looks like a Haywood Wakefield piece,I’ve been seeing HW tables on my local FB feed. Was tempted recently to scoop up a couple of HW dough box tables. These have a flip open lid instead of a drawer. Only $125 for both, these ones were too colonial in style for my taste but pretty cool ntl.
I have a very nice Sellers baking cupboard called a Hoosier cabinet. I bought it years ago and store cookbooks, board games and other bits in it. Recently someone listed a bakers table made by Sellers, a perfect match to my Sellers “Hoosier”cupboard. It was an oak table with the same enamel top plus three drawers one steel lined for potatoes/onions, glass knobs. Never came across one before, I thought it was an old Hoosier cut down to table size but nope an original. Only $125 I thought that was a bargain. I bought it. Sold an old treadle sewing machine to make room for it.
…and the clothing sections are filled with discarded fast fashion garbage from Shein and the like.
I’ve stopped donating to Goodwill because, as you noted, part of my motivation was helping my community. I’d rather just sell stuff through Facebook Marketplace if I think I have a nice and useful item someone would be happy to find cheap.