The Unexpected Economic Ripple Effect of Thrifting
The Making of a 53 Billion Dollar Industry
Thrifting was, in the beginning, a very different event than today. Back in the early 2000s I had to get my son an advertising T-shirt for a school project. Between sports practices and homework and the reality that I was not going to spend $40-50 on a T-shirt he would never wear again, I drove to the local GoodWill and at that time it was the only local resale near me. Pulling into the parking lot I saw another woman I knew going in, well socially that would not work I could not be seen at a thrift store without becoming part of the local gossip, so I Parked the car in a far corner of the lot of a neighboring store and sat and waited until she exited. I noticed she too had parked her car in a remote corner of the parking lot probably fearing the same social effects.
Today thrifting is a 53 billion dollar industry a status symbol word. Very often women of means are the ones searching the stores, they have the time, money, knowledge, and drive to own their piece of the cottage industry pie. Not to mention many have backgrounds in business management or finance that give them the upper foot in buying and selling. Many of these transactions are private cash sales, such as a woman selling her Chanel bag for $1500.00 cash on the Facebook marketplace, to a “friend” The 53 billion dollar number is much higher and no one can accurately say how much.
Twenty years later how does it affect our economy? Let’s start with a friend’s cashmere sweater. She is at the local thrift store looking around, her hobby is knowing obscure luxury brands, and like her friends can spot a fake LV or Chanel at 50 feet, she finds a sweater in a $1.00 bin, she scores, then cleans it up and puts it on Poshmark for $18.00 well below value but for her, it’s the “Find”, someone immediately offers her $15.00 she accepts and ships, the women is in Portland. A few weeks go by and while searching her favorite brands an identical sweater pops up for sale on Etsy the seller has a similar name in Portland, for $85.00. She watches after a short time the sweater is marked down to $45.00 and it is sold. Did it go onto a local resale store or end user we will never know. But what we do know is not only did that sweater travel across the country it was probably never worn, yet it supported the Postal Service, Office supply companies, Poshmark, Etsy, credit card companies and banks, Fuel Services, and numerous extended workers outside of the three people that sold the sweater. That is the ripple effect of second-hand clothing.
Thrifting no longer has the social or economic boundaries it did twenty years ago, its existence supports far more than the “Gig” Thrifters, it supports a multitude of related industries.