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Went away with a couple of mom friends and I was surprised to hear that their teens both thrift for used clothing! These are 15 year old teens without jobs who don’t really need to. I asked why and heard that skater guy is very brand conscious (buying the wrong size or womens, lol), and the other is a band guy who could care less about brands and just found a cool, unique jacket or whatever as self expression. Either way, they both get a thrill from the hunt. And these upper middle class kids as well as my kids don’t seem to have a stigma about used clothing and shoes that I think my generation had. Mine don’t enjoy shopping in person at all, thrifting or otherwise.
Incidentally, I’ve been seeing a lot of videos on Youtube about clothing sourcing getting expensive and more competitive lately and just people wising up about what things are worth.
Sharing a couple of articles I found on Google.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/24/17861398/gen-z-shopping-habits-juul-glossier
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I always thrifted or bought second-hand from places like pawn shops as a teen in the early 90s – why pay full retail when you can get some clothes, CD’s, video games, etc. for a lot cheaper?
I remember when I was in my early 20’s having a woman approach me and making comments on my outfit. She said I looked really good and not like the other guys at the bar/club that all had Walmart clothes on. Little did she realize that the clothes were from the thrift store!
There is some stigma people have – they feel like thrifting is below them for some reason, and I’ve been mocked repeatedly in my life for my thrifty ways. I always think those that thrift are smart, resourceful, and more successful than those who mock it.
Like the articles posted here, the Toronto Star had one today and one of the comments was that the person shops thrift, but is embarrassed to be seen with bags from the thrift store. Be proud of it! All of us Scavengers will have the last laugh at those with luxury cars, huge mortgages, and consumer debt one day…
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My parents never went to thrift stores. The stigma was that those stores were for “poor people”. Yeah….we weren’t exactly rich.
Trust me, had I known what I know now I would have vastly preferred to get all my clothes from Goodwill rather than get my new clothes and shoes from K-Mart. It was rough wearing K-mart clothes in the “spellout” era of the early 90’s.The first time I started going into thrifts was in the very early 00’s in college with my girlfriend (now wife) and her mother (They were my OG Scavenger Life guru’s). Maybe it was different in other areas, but here…well…they stunk. Literally. Every thrift store was dark, grungy, and had terrible odors. One I went to near my college literally smelled like poop.
About 10 years ago the thrifts started cleaning up and improving their image. Most chain thrift stores now are very clean, well lit, and organized. They don’t put out clothes with odors at all. Of course, the prices have increased with the quality.
I try to source as much of my familie’s wardrobe as I can from Thrifting. Our wardrobes are definitely greatly improved because of it. My wife even finds it hard to shop at standard stores now, because the clothing selection is so limited and the clothes just feel cheap. I’ve ruined her….muwahahahahaha!
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My middle-schooler at the time (2005ish) asked me to take him to the Salvation Army to look for jeans. He wanted skinny jeans and, at the time, that meant buying women’s jeans even though he was a guy. That was the first time I stepped into a thrift store and I never looked back. At the time, I was a garage sale person and selling old books on Ebay. My aha moment that there were places I could shop all year round.
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I never really hit the thrifts, but as a youth, back in Boston, I routinely patrolled the neighborhood on trash nights looking for broken and trashed bicycles.
Also there was a very cool used record store I used to go to for music to add to my “mix tapes”. They always had cool stuff and lots of promos, that I assume they got from the radio stations. I had the white Madonna album and the red J. Geils album etc… Now they’re all gone.
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I was thrifting before thrifting was cool LOL And yes, I remember stinky thrifts, homeless guys wandering in and using the aisles as a bathroom, and so forth. Most thrifts are far more like a retail store these days (and many are in “better” neighborhoods.) I recall years ago, advising a college girl to hit the thrifts and she asked me “But don’t I need a card?, like Welfare people have?”
But I think the rise of ebay and online selling generally, along with the rise of all the home decor shows and magazines and blogs…..those factors have made “thrifting” a perfectly acceptable activity for many people. Same is true of yard saleing. When I first started going to yard sales around here…which didn’t even exist around here when I was really young…..it was mostly me, my brother and a lot of grandmas looking for stuff for their grandkids.
And flea markets? They were primarily the domain of old guys looking for tools, grandmas looking for more stuff for the grandkids, hard core antiquers, and people like me, who hunted for stuff I liked that most people didn’t care about. For a couple summers I often took a friend along, a gal who hunted up vintage clothing and oddball stuff. I knew flea markets were becoming legit when , some years later, she was being profiled in magazine articles praising her eye for style (by then she was working as an assistant to a big name designer in New York).
So, the whole thing has changed dramatically. We were kind of oddballs back then, but now, it seems to be America’s favorite pastime.
Sometimes I miss those days…mostly because there was a lot more great stuff available and a lot less competition. But, it is what it is LOL
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