As already mentioned, valuable items that the poor could use don’t hit the floor, and common staples like clothes and dishes are in abundance.
My cynical take is that the people who complain about non-poor people shopping at thrift stores are also people who can afford not to be shopping at thrift stores but are upset that there’s so much competition over the rare finds (valuable items that miss the attention of the sorters and end up on the floor at a ridiculously price). They see someone middle class walking out with a score and are jealous.
The good stuff gets pulled and put at shopgoodwill . com (link broken, of course). I’ve bought some interesting stuff there, but it’s essentially a small-scale version of eBay, with comparable prices. At least sale profits go back to the local Goodwill stores, instead of some reseller.
I’ve seen resellers going through the books at thrift stores, scanning bar codes or ISBN numbers with an app that shows what the book sells for on Amazon. One guy had a cart full of books, but he passed on the German translation of the Koran that was on the shelf.
The only time I got something “free” at a thrift store was at a Salvation Army store. It was an old book, and the checkout person said it was free. “Free?”, I asked. She said, “Bibles are free.” It wasn’t a Bible, and being a good person that I am, I paid the sticker prce.
For my church rummage sale, it’s explicitly both: Raising some money for the church (which mostly goes back to the needy in some form or another), and giving people the opportunity to get things for an affordable price. If it were just one or the other, it wouldn’t be worth the amount of work we put into it.
I agree with the first. I disagree with the second, because thrift stores have more than they could sell or one person could buy - people have more stuff than space and donate often. The story of how tons of clothing ends up in emerging nations and interferes with local clothing manufacturer is a bigger ethical concern, but a mixed bag.
My brother and sister both volunteer at thrift stores run by their churches. They get there early and sort through thousands of items, identify valuable items and buy them for a couple of bucks, and sell them on various websites for many times that (sometimes hundreds of dollars).
They both make tens of thousands a year on this. They used to cruise yard sales in affluent neighborhoods, but “volunteering” at the thrift shops is much more efficient.
In the last year they have some friendly competition from others doing the same thing.
Each of their net worth’s is in eight figures. They don’t NEED an additional $20k/year. But they probably don’t need to do a lot of things they do for money.
Ethical thrift-store shopping: if your job doesn’t require sturdy workwear, steel-toe boots, etc., maybe leave it for a person who needs them for their $15/hr manual labor job instead of your lumbersexual wardrobe.
So your siblings volunteer at charity thrift stores mostly for early access to the good stuff? That seems unethical. Should they not instead assist the thrift stores with better merchandising of the valuable items?
I refer the honorable gentleman to the many stories I have related about my siblings. A more coin-operated group of humans you will not meet.
These are people who demanded to see my tax returns because they wouldn’t believe we paid payroll taxes for our nanny, rather than paying her under the table, as every “law-and-order” trumpeter is obliged to do. They positively freaked out when they found that we had paid sales tax on out of state internet purchases (this was back in the days when many sellers did not have nexus in all states and did not add the tax to your purchase).
Their kids mock my wife mercilessly for volunteering at a food pantry, a homeless outreach organization and a hospice for decades and having “nothing to show for it”
Ugh. One of the volunteers at my church looks out for all of the nice items for online sale, too, but she does that on a volunteer basis, too, with all of the proceeds still going to the church. And volunteers do get first look at all of the items and the opportunity to buy them at the same price as everyone else, but so far as I know, all of our volunteers do that purely for their own use, not resale.
I should have mentioned that both these siblings specialize in non-profits in their financial sector “day jobs” which in different ways means they help either “donors” or managers of non profits maximize personal benefit while staying on the right side of the law (sort of) and still maintaining a good rating on sites like Guidestar.
Or, for that matter, the library bookstore I volunteer at. We list rare or valuable items that aren’t suitable for sale in the bookstore online, or use an auction house, and if we have ENOUGH overstock, we may send it to a reseller (in our case, Better World Books, from where we get a check periodically and the shipping is free) or even give it to thrift stores in the area.
The money goes to Friends of the Library, which is the fundraising arm and the money is used for things that aren’t in the library’s/city’s budget.
We don’t ask any of our shoppers what socioeconomic level they’re at.
I like to say that these enterprises keep things out of the landfill, until they belong there.
Yep. Having sort of got back into 35mm film cameras (I have a special use case), I discovered this first-hand.
NO thrift stores have 20-30 year old cameras in them like they used to. But they’re all being sold on Ebay, and most even say they’re being sold by the Salvation Army of , or whatever charity it is.
Thrift stores do seem to be packed with what to most people is stuff with little value except to people who need very basic stuff, like corporate swag coffee mugs, or one-off pieces of silverware, or whatever clothes they have. There’s also a bunch of worthless crap like strange fitness gear, strange VHS tapes, and the like.
Jesus… talk about missing the POINT. That’s definitely unethical; if nothing else, they should really be volunteering to sell that stuff on behalf of the churches, not use it as a sketchy way to enrich themselves. You don’t volunteer to benefit yourself, after all.
Once an item hits the shelf with a price tag, the reseller performs a valuable service for the thrift store, quick sale for cash. The reseller performs a valuable service for the economy, moving products to a sales location where they are highly valued.
The volunteer/reseller is likely taking advantage of their position, in the sense that they should be looking to maximize value to the charity, not themselves. If there’s a valuable product that is underpriced, they should be identifying it for repricing, not snapping it up for a profit.
However, if an item is fairly priced for a small local thrift store, I have no problem at all with a volunteer doing work on their own time to gain extra value from the item. Sometimes, that’s the price of getting people to spend a Saturday afternoon sorting through piles of old junk.
I don’t understand this logic. Thrift store prices are generally cheaper, but not always that much cheaper than buying new. Many thrift stores (including the one I shop at, Savers), are not fronts or fund raising for charitable organization, but are in fact for-profit companies. People with a reduce/reuse/recycle mindset are attracted to thrift stores, as well as people looking for vintage items, whether as a fashion aesthetic or because they believe they are of a higher quality than the equivalent products currently on the market. Neither of these mindsets are necessarily connected to income level. It’s also not a zero-sum game. If I want to eat out cheaply at McDonald’s, am I denying anything from a low income person who can only afford to eat out at McDonalds?
Right now McDs has no problem sourcing as many meals per day at that store as there is demand. Your Big Mac served at lunch does not deprive a hungry Mom of her dinner while driving home at 10pm after her double shift as a hotel maid. Back during the worst of COVID it might well have.
Thrift stores? Most seem bursting with generic “stuff”, but as noted by many people in various ways above, the “good stuff” is rare on the shelves. A well-off person snagging good stuff more or less for entertainment may indeed be depriving someone else who really needs that item and can’t source it at full price.
You just made me feel better about Goodwill taking high value items from their stream as part of their process. Better the money goes to their work than to some “volunteers.”
BTW on my recent tour of thrift stores in the Pacific Northwest I went to a high end Goodwill store, where they sell some of this good stuff. I also went to a Goodwill outlet store where the stuff that doesn’t get sold at the usual stores (or perhaps is not good enough for them) gets another shot. Most of it is sold by the pound.
Yeah, that’s the third benefit of thrift stores, recycling. I buy most of my puzzles at thrift stores, and then donate them to our library for their sale.