Tales of Thrift: The Golden Era

Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. I’m adding this as a kind of introduction slash context for this new series, Tales of Thrift. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. Its themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff, but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I ultimately shelved my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I’ve decided that there are parts I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!

Once you get to a certain age, it becomes physically impossible not to start referring to specific times in the past as The Good Old Days. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. If you’re over 40 and this hasn’t happened to you, don’t be too smug; there will come a day, sooner or later, when you’ll wake up in the morning feeling like you’re coming off a three-day bender because you went to bed after 10:00PM, and the words “things used to be different back in the day” will escape your lips before you even realize what is happening. You will try, for a while, to keep those words to yourself – biting them back or muttering them under your breath – but it’s a losing fight. Those words will come out of your mouth eventually, and people around you will hear them and, congrats, you will officially become an Old Person at that moment. But listen! The truth is that thrifting really was different back in the day, and that day wasn’t all that long ago. I don’t know exactly when the Golden Era of Thrift started, but it was still in full swing by 2016 when I thrifted my first Burberry trench for $8 at Goodwill. For the next couple of years, it seemed impossible to walk into a thrift store and not come out with an armful of designer clothing. Yves Saint Laurent, Dries Van Noten, Etro, Marni, Christian Louboutin, Issey Miyake, Rick Owens, Valentino, Ferragamo, MaxMara, Jil Sander, Moschino, Alexander McQueen, Erdem … I can keep going, but you get the point. My closet got luxurified (not a word, go with it) practically overnight. And not a moment too soon, because the Golden Era ground to a halt by the end of the decade; 2019 was the last great year of thrift, not that I knew it at the time. If thrifting were the Roman Empire, we are now in the decline and fall phase, minus deranged emperors and barbarians at the gates. As Alanis might say: isn’t it ironic that, at the very same time, thrifting has never been more popular?

The first hint I had that things were a-changing came in early 2021 when I read Adam Minter’s Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. The book, which extensively documents various facets of the multi-billion global secondhand industry, makes the argument that thrift stores are facing a very real crisis thanks to a rising tide of unwanted secondhand – a crisis not of volume, but of quality. Simply put, thrift stores have no future if all they have to sell is crap. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is; nobody wants to buy crap. And I mean nobody. Historically, the Global South was the final destination of unsold secondhand goods originating from the affluent northern hemisphere, but as its populations become increasingly sophisticated players in the capitalist game, they are less willing to accept low quality secondhand goods, particularly at a time when their preference for and access to new goods is growing rapidly. Minter writes persuasively, backing up his argument with plenty of data, but as I read his book, my first instinct was to scoff. Just a few weeks prior, I had found a Gucci blouse, Alexander McQueen flats, and a Carven skirt at my favourite Value Village store in a single visit: what crisis of quality? Maybe one existed in the places Minter visited for his research; surely it did not exist everywhere. Not in Edmonton, anyway. Thrift stores were getting better here, not worse – even the pandemic had barely slowed things down.

Or so I thought.

What I didn’t know in 2021 was that I was witnessing the tail end of thrift’s glory days. Over the next couple of years, the reality began to sink in as the quality of thrift merchandise started to nose-dive. Minter was right. Thrift stores are facing an existential threat and it remains to be seen whether we – the global, collective “we” – will find a solution that allows them, along with the entire secondhand industry, to survive into the next century. One thing is for sure: the Golden Era of Thrift is over, for now at least. The reasons are probably too multifaceted and complex for someone like me to summarize without making a hash of it, but hey – when has that ever stopped me? Let’s give it the old college try.

The ramp-up in global mass production, from the 1980s onwards, made secondhand the multi-billion-dollar industry it is today and also sowed the seeds of its destruction. Mass production required mass consumption in order to be profitable, so consumers had to be encouraged and cajoled to buy, buy, buy – which they did, because capitalism is phenomenally good at selling things to people. All that mass consumption left people with more stuff than they could use or even fit inside their homes. The excess had to go somewhere; what didn’t go straight into landfills ended up in thrift stores – and antique malls, and flea markets, and eBay. The secondhand industry grew at a similar pace to the retail industry, which is to say exponentially over the last 40 years. What hasn’t grown at an equally impressive rate is people’s income. How can you keep selling more, and more, and more to people who have less, and less, and less to spend? You sell everything for cheaper. Nothing in life is free, though – especially not in a capitalist system – so cheaper prices mean lower quality. There are two corollaries of low quality which create a feedback loop for mass consumption. One, low quality functions as a kind of planned obsolescence; cheaply made goods tend to fall apart faster and need replacement sooner. Two, low quality together with low prices create a perception that goods are disposable and not worth the effort to care for and maintain over a long period of time. Fast fashion clothing is often discarded even before its low quality has rendered it unusable. Why take the time to properly launder a $15 shirt if you know it’s going to fall apart in a year anyway and meanwhile you can just buy another one for $10 – prices always being in a race to the bottom? The more we buy cheap things, the more we buy.

Clothing quality in particular has declined at an ever-faster rate since 2008. At that time, most mass-market clothing brands and retailers found it necessary to pivot to the fast fashion business model in order to remain profitable in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Once consumers grew used to cheap prices, there was no going back … nor any reason to. As it turned out, people didn’t seem to miss the higher quality of pre-fast fashion clothing – or, if they did, not enough to stop buying cheap clothes. Over time, this redefined consumer expectations. People forgot that cotton tees used to be thick enough to be opaque, or that pockets in women’s dresses hadn’t always been a luxury. Writing in 2012, Elizabeth L. Cline observed this phenomenon already in full swing. Speaking to a young designer, she was told:

“… something even more shocking: “There are very few high-quality garments being produced at all. A very, very, very small amount. So small that most people never even see it in their lifetimes. People are wearing rags, basically.” That is tragic, I thought, and the more I learned about the history of fashion, the more I was convinced she was right. Quality has been whittled away little by little, to the point where the average store-bought style is an extraordinarily thin and simple, albeit bedazzled and brightly colored, facsimile of a garment. Yet, I suspect few consumers born after 1980 have any idea what they’re missing.”[1]

I feel called out, Elizabeth! But anyway, there is now an entire new generation who joined the market after 2008 and has never known anything except fast fashion. It is no wonder that Gen Z has embraced the latest wave of fast fashion, as embodied by Shein, Temu and the like; if, to someone like me, Shein represents the nadir of the fashion industry as I know it, for this generation it is simply business as usual. And, no, it’s not a coincidence that I picked 2019 – which marked the beginning of Shein’s rise to global prominence – as the end of thrift’s Golden Era.

So, what exactly was that Golden Era? In my working hypothesis, it was a period defined by the confluence of several factors: the economic bull-run of the 2010s; rising levels of consumption fueled by declining prices and the growing popularity of online shopping; the juxtaposition of the everything-is-disposable mindset and increasing awareness of climate change issues; and changing demographics. Cheap credit made everything, including luxury goods, more accessible and, in turn, more disposable. People binged consumer goods and looked for ways to purge not only the excess but also their consciences. Baby boomers began retiring and downsizing their homes; the contents of those homes, accumulated over a lifetime (or even several generations), needed a place to go. Everything – the bad, the good, and, occasionally, the exceptional – found its way into thrift stores. There may have been other factors at play as well; I’m not an economist, ok? All I know is that, for a time, the decline in the quality of goods which found their way into thrift stores lagged behind the decline in quality of new retail goods, even as the volume of thrift donations surged. That lag was thrift’s Golden Era. Treasures were plentiful, and thrift prices were low precisely because treasures were plentiful. It couldn’t last forever, though for a while it seemed like it might. The supply of older, higher quality goods is ever dwindling, while the quality of new goods coming onto the market continues to decline. The pandemic wreaked havoc on everything, not least of all on people’s financial means, further shrinking the retail market for high-quality goods. What remains of those high-quality goods in circulation is increasingly being diverted away from thrift stores thanks to resale platforms like Poshmark, ThredUp, Depop, and eBay, which allow people to recoup a portion of their sunk costs. As the volume of goods being donated keeps rising and the quality keeps declining, thrift stores face a double whammy: they have fewer good items to sell to their customers, which means less revenue, and more crap to dispose of (often via landfill), which means higher operating costs. It is no wonder, then, that thrift prices keep creeping up; the thrift stores’ math ain’t mathing otherwise.

By the time the general public was starting to hear about thrift’s Golden Era, it was already nearly over. This isn’t just my pessimism talking; I have seen it with my own eyes. It’s as if, around 2021, someone turned the tap off; since then, designer stuff has all but disappeared, what mall brand items can be found are often in poor condition, and rack are overflowing with Shein clothing that makes Zara look like haute couture. And it’s not just clothing that’s going to the dogs. Other categories, like furniture and housewares, are suffering a similar fate. Turn over any random item in a thrift store and you’re more likely than not to find a sticker from HomeSense or, worse, Dollarama. To add insult to injury, that sticker is likely to display a price only marginally higher than what the one being charged by the thrift store. Forget trying to find a treasure; even bargains seem harder to get these days. Meanwhile, a whole new group of people, hyped on tales of the Golden Era, are joining the ranks of thrifters searching for those increasingly elusive treasures. I’ve often wondered how many of them feel disappointed by what they find (or don’t find) and end up deciding that thrifting is overrated. If TikTok is any measure, the answer would appear to be “not many”. In truth, that question is simply a projection of my own growing nostalgia, as an Old Person who remembers the way things used to be and aren’t anymore.

So, yeah: I know how lucky I’ve been in my thrifter’s journey. I was in the right place at the right time and built a life for myself that wouldn’t have been possible without thrifting – a life rich in beauty acquired without extraordinary wealth. The window of opportunity for others to do the same is closing. As Adam Minter prophesied, we are facing a crisis of quality, which does not belong to the secondhand industry, but to our culture as a whole. The way we consume and how we relate to the things we consume must change if we want to avoid that crisis becoming an irreversible disaster. Here are two cents and a sermon you can’t take to the bank: we should buy less and only buy what matters. We should buy things because we value them, not because they are cheap. We should honour that value in the way we handle those things while they are in our possession, and we should honour it when they pass out of our hands. This is not a modest proposal. For those of us stuck in the trenches of late-stage capitalism, it is a fucking massive ask. It’s asking for nothing short of a philosophical revolution. It’s scary and it’s hard and the alternative is unthinkable so here we are. We need thrifting to help us become revolutionaries. We need thrifting to have a future, but it’s up to us to write it.

[1] Elizabeth L. Cline, Over-Dresssed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, 2012, p. 90