All hail the thrift

Liz Worth is a poet, author and performance artist.

I’m limping, but I’m here. I’ve had this day marked in my calendar for weeks: A secondhand market on the other side of town. I would hate to miss it, even though I’m in pain. I hurt my ankle jogging the day before.

“Why are we doing this?” my husband asks on the drive over. “You can hardly walk.”

You’d think after 15 years of marriage he would know by now: Nothing will stop me from thrifting. I’m driven by a conviction (or is it a compulsion?) when it comes to secondhand shopping. No garage sale goes unvisited. No thrift store goes ignored. Online, it’s not unusual for me to have at least a tab or two open to Facebook Marketplace and eBay so I can browse between tasks.

My obsession with secondhand shopping started when I was a kid in the eighties. My parents, who had me later in life, were born during the Great Depression. They were raised on hand-me-downs and believed in making things last. My mom’s wardrobe rejected trends and instead represented every decade she’d been alive. My dad’s old undershirts were recycled into washcloths and dust rags when they wore thin.

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It feels like a far cry from today’s world, where so many things seem to become obsolete as soon as you buy them. One of my friends, a teacher, laments the attitudes that many of his students bring to class. They’re rough with everything, he tells me, and they know that anything can be replaced. If their favourite toy breaks, their parents can get another from Amazon within a day.

The internet has made it possible to get pretty much anything you want, whenever you want it, but patience was a hallmark of shopping when I grew up. We mail-ordered from Sears catalogues and order forms on the backs of cereal boxes. There was no overnight shipping: A six-to-eight-week wait was common.

Maybe that’s what helped me develop such patience for secondhand shopping, the success of which relies on being in the right place at the right time. Our summer weekends were spent sifting through garage sales and picked-over flea markets. Sometimes we’d score big, like the red 1960s swag lamp we got for five bucks, or the acoustic guitar we got for 20.

Other times we’d come home empty-handed, disappointed but never discouraged. One time, when I was nine, I ruined a favourite t-shirt digging through a bin at Goodwill that was, unbeknownst to me, covered in some kind of black goo. When I stepped back from my dig my mother looked down and said, “What have you gotten into?” The store manager, baffled, was unable to discern what the mystery substance was, or where it came from.

Still, there were always more benefits than drawbacks to thrifting for us. The generation gap between my parents and I made it difficult to find common ground; secondhand shopping became our bridge. At some point, my dad and I developed an almost psychic sense between us when it came to thrifting. Every so often, we’d look at each other and say, “Do you feel like going to the Salvation Army today?”

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Despite the Amazonification of today’s consumer culture, thrifting is having a moment. In fact, the resale industry has become a behemoth. Contrary to fast fashion and TikTok-fueled microtrends, secondhand shopping is booming, with Gen Z credited as a major driver of this shift: Research by PwC found that 63 per cent of Gen Z consumers were planning to shop for vintage or upcycled items for the holidays this year. And Forbes reported that the American secondhand market is predicted to reach US$74-billion in sales by 2029.

This isn’t anything new: Humans have been scooping up each other’s unwanted swag for hundreds of years. In Europe, the secondhand trade has roots in the Middle Ages and grew throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Even the word “thrift” dates back to the 1300s, rooted in the word “thrive,” which is what I feel thrifting helps me do.

Even though “thrifting” as a verb most directly relates to shopping at thrift stores, it doesn’t mean thrifters limit themselves to the local charity shops. We are just as likely to scope out estate sales, antique malls and curated vintage boutiques, as well as resale sites like Poshmark and Etsy. ThredUp, another online reseller, reports that a combination of factors, including budgets and environmental concerns, are driving more people to shop secondhand, with nostalgia also pushing up demand.

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Reselling has become a source of controversy for dedicated thrifters, especially as the industry grows. It’s now a popular side hustle, and pretty much anyone can do it: All it takes is a few minutes to open an account on a resale site and away you go. Unfortunately, that means secondhand shoppers need to be savvy; inexperienced (or unscrupulous) resellers don’t always understand that just because something is used doesn’t mean it’s vintage, but they might charge as though it is (an item has to be at least 20 years old to receive the “vintage” designation; items over 100 years old are generally considered “antiques”). Social media is also flooded with accusations that resellers, some of whom spend their working hours searching through thrift stores to curate their inventory, are taking “all the good stuff” and leaving the dregs behind.

Not that age automatically makes an item valuable. Still, the demand for nostalgia is speculated as one reason for price increases at thrift stores across the country, something that chains like Value Village have come under fire for in recent years. Many local thrift stores are also now rife with clothing from fast-fashion labels like Shein and Temu.

But it’s important to remember that thrift stores have always been full of things people don’t want. It’s why those items end up there in the first place. In the nineties, thrift stores were lousy with acid-wash jeans and shoulder pads; the eighties were out and grunge was in. Today, acid-wash denim is rare and highly sought after among vintage aficionados, as is nearly anything eighties. Thirty years ago, you couldn’t give the stuff away. It’s hard to imagine these types of sea changes, but the fast-fashion trends everyone derides today could very well be tomorrow’s must-have vintage.

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But there is a more practical issue when it comes to the rising prices of used clothing, vintage or not: Thrifting is a necessity for some. For generations, thrift stores have given people like my working-class parents the chance to own things they might not have been able to afford otherwise. That thrifting marked your socioeconomic status meant that it came with a certain amount of stigma, too.

Even today, in spite of its popularity, many people still don’t understand why you would want to wear someone else’s clothes, or bring their used furniture into your home. I once saw a colleague visibly turn up her nose when I shared that my outfit she had just complimented was bought at a Salvation Army store. The corners of her mouth curved downward with disapproval as she told me she didn’t go to those places.

But no one will talk me out of the joy I get from secondhand browsing, especially when I see clothing labels from long-gone stores like D’Allaird’s and Simpsons, or dog-eared boxes of board games that used to be advertised between Saturday morning cartoons.

Of course, I’m not always shopping. I regularly release things back into the wild, donating or reselling items for others to enjoy when I’m done with them.

My parents were the same: While they loved a good charity shop, they regularly cleared out, too. One year, in the late nineties, we decided to have a garage sale. I was in my teens then and decided I was too old for My Little Pony. Out went my once-beloved childhood toys, along with a wooden dollhouse that my dad had painstakingly built for me from a kit many years before. I had a family of flocked bunnies – Calico Critters – that lived inside, which I moved to a shoebox before we slapped a price tag on their palatial home.

The dollhouse was the first thing that sold. The My Little Ponies went next.

That garage sale later became a point of regret for us. “We should’ve held onto that dollhouse,” my dad would often lament. I felt the same about the My Little Ponies. When I got my first credit card, I immediately opened an eBay account to buy them all back.

I’m in my 40s now, and my parents have been gone a long time. Their deaths pushed me to another major phase of decision-making, one that I approached much more carefully after learning my lessons from that ill-fated garage sale. Along with her amazing eye for used clothes, my mom collected ceramic bunnies and Murano glass. She also had a few Royal Doulton figurines that were a particular point of pride. Once marketed as collectors’ items, Royal Doultons were a status symbol for my mom. It took her months to save for each one. For a time, I considered keeping them, but eventually passed them on: They deserve to be displayed and admired by someone who loves them as much as my mom did.

In her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo encourages us to appreciate that everything has a purpose – even inanimate objects. And like people, objects need to fulfill their destiny, which is to be used or enjoyed. That’s what I tell myself whenever I decide to part with something dear: This will make someone’s day when they find it at the thrift store.

This is another reason why I don’t worry that the growing popularity of thrifting is ruining the experience. Every day, someone, somewhere, is letting go of their most precious things, and there is no shortage of stuff on the planet.

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As I started to slowly let go of the things that once filled our family home, I started to see thrift stores in a way I hadn’t before. Where I used to see shelves of anonymous porcelain figurines, I now notice uniformity and themes among them. It’s clear to me when collections have been freshly surrendered. Similarly, you can tell when a closet has been emptied, the way sizes and styles repeat along the racks. Sometimes, the owner’s initials will appear on the care tags, giving you a glimpse of an item’s previous life in a retirement residence or care home.

When I was growing up, I thrifted in the hopes of finding things my classmates had, like Levi’s jeans and Converse sneakers. I wanted brand names, even if they didn’t come from the mall. But now I gravitate toward things that have more history behind them.

Soul, I call it.

I buy vintage blouses and wonder who wore them before me: What restaurants have these clothes seen? What kinds of parties did they attend? You can always tell when a piece was someone’s favourite: the buttons will be loose, the collar slightly discoloured. These often become my favourite finds. I like to give them a second life with another spin around a dance floor or a visit to a café.

This mindset has also helped me feel a sense of community between myself and others who buy and sell previously loved things. For me, thrifting has become more than shopping; it’s a lifestyle, a collective tending of each other’s memories.

Several years ago, I started looking for a dollhouse like the one my father had wished we’d kept. It took some time, but I finally found one this year on Facebook Marketplace. The seller, an older woman, showed it off when I arrived. She’d assembled it herself.

There were others she’d made too, if I was interested, she said. She loved them, but had to start letting go; it was time for her to downsize. Our eyes met, and we both smiled slowly. I understood.

“I’ve been looking for one like this for a long time,” I said, assuring her it was in good hands. My Calico Critters were waiting at home, after all, ready to move in.

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