What ruined thrift stores

I was watching LGR’s retrospective on making retro videos on YouTube and one of the things he said struck me. He said thrifting is a lot different now than it was in 2009. In this blog post, I’ll tell you what ruined thrift stores. I saw it happen while it was happening.

A step or two away from digging through garbage

The first time I went to a thrift store was in 2003. And let me tell you, it made me uncomfortable. If you are used to today’s thrift stores, it might have made you uncomfortable too. It’s not an understatement to say it was aisle after aisle of broken and just plain grimy stuff organized haphazardly. There was usually good stuff intermixed with the junk, but you had to dig for it.

To me, it felt like it was one or two steps removed from digging through my neighbor’s garbage. Rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty weren’t just expressions, they were necessities if you were going to find anything.

The experience was a lot like a Goodwill outlet, but without the bins. The stuff was on shelves instead, and it was individually priced. But the prices were low enough you might as well have been paying by the pound in a lot of cases.

How I became a thrift store regular

By 2005, I was a regular. Not because it was fun. I learned to tolerate it and eventually to like it. But I was there because my career was in the toilet. I was buying household necessities, I was buying things to resell, and I was buying things to keep myself amused cheaply.

It’s not like I was getting rich. I was making around $100 a day doing that when I was in between jobs. And when I did have steady work, I would go on the weekends and maybe one or two nights a week to make some supplemental income. And I would use most of my paid time off in the spring so I could go thrifting when people were doing spring cleaning and getting rid of a bunch of stuff.

I was far from the only person doing this. I ran into the same people all the time, and eventually became friendly with some of them. Some were very territorial, and there was this one guy named Marvin who would take things from your cart when you weren’t looking, pay for less than half of the stuff he was walking out of the store with, and wouldn’t hesitate to steal your wallet if he saw the chance. Don’t bother getting his license plate number and reporting him, either. His car had stolen tags.

They weren’t lowlives. Maybe not even Marvin

Marvin was a problem. But the majority of them were honest people and they would respect you if you played by the rules, respected them, and didn’t cheat them. Most of them were highly intelligent and well educated. And some of them had been doing this for decades.

The other thing about that particular group was that they were discreet and they didn’t make a mess. They might load up a cart with stuff and only end up buying half of it, but they would get another cart, find some place where they weren’t bothering anybody, examine everything, decide what they wanted and didn’t want, and sort it between the two carts. If there was someone else they knew and trusted who was there, they would look through each others’ reject carts. Then they would put all the stuff they weren’t going to buy back where they found it, pay for the stuff they were buying, and they’d be back again later in the week to do it all over again.

I even wonder about Marvin. Was Marvin always a bad person? Or did Marvin go bad because society failed him?

The alien, fatherless and the widow

The thrift stores took all of this in stride. For many of them, it was just part of their mission. They saw their purpose as taking discarded items that people didn’t want anymore and hiring people who would otherwise have difficulty finding work to sort through it, fix it, and sell it. The idea was just to keep the inventory moving through the store. And if people were making money by buying stuff from them and fixing it up or cleaning it up a bit more and reselling it, they were fine with that. Most of them had religious roots and took the Biblical command to leave some gleanings behind for the alien, fatherless, and the widow seriously.

And no, despite the lyrics from that Christian pop band Third Day, the alien, fatherless, or the widow isn’t all of us. If you know where the money for next week’s groceries is coming from, those Bible verses aren’t about you. In our contemporary society, it’s chronically unemployed or underemployed, if not actual aliens, fatherless, and widows. We still have those today.

Thrift stores used to provide a bit of a social safety net for them. But as they lost their religion and started gleaning the inventory to squeeze out bigger and bigger profits, that safety net got weaker.

Why thrift stores ruined themselves by gentrifying

Things changed as the new decade approached. If you had about $1,000, you could buy a handheld Bluetooth barcode reader with a reasonably accurate laser in it, a handheld computer that ran Windows CE, and you could subscribe to price guides that ran like an app on the device and looked up prices from a database when you scanned their barcodes.

And that led to scorched Earth tactics. It became a race to find as much as you could as fast as you could because that other guy saw it as a zero-sum game. I was respectful and left things how I found them and didn’t make a mess, and a lot of other people took a similar approach, but it only took a couple of bad actors to ruin it for everybody.

One of our local bad actors even bragged to the manager of one of the stores about what they were doing. Soon after, one of the stores in my area found a consultant who said they could help them maximize the profits from the donations they were receiving. One by one, other stores started doing the same thing. Maybe they used the same consultant. Maybe there were a bunch of consultants teaching thrift stores how to do this. It’s likely some of them learned it from each other.

Curation time

The result was the thrift stores started curating all of the donations that came in. If something came in that was valuable, it might not ever reach the sales floor. Instead, they’d list it on Amazon or Ebay. Goodwill became one of the biggest sellers on those two sites, before taking it a step further and opening up their own online auction site so they could get even bigger profit margins.

In the event that something valuable did reach the sales floor, they would find the highest listing they could find on eBay, print it out, laminate it, and put that listing right on the item to justify whatever price they were trying to get, which would easily be 10 times what they previously would have sold it for.

Nobody can know everything, so bargains still can slip through the cracks. But the days of being able to find a shopping cart full of junk that cost you $50 that you can turn around and sell for $150 in exchange for a couple of hours work finding it and a couple more hours of work cleaning it up, listing it, and shipping it were gone.

And before you say I was profiteering, when I came home with that load of stuff, I still had several hours worth of work ahead of me. The thrift stores were trying to get all of the money but only put in the time to research.

This was a gradual thing that slowly spread across the country. In my case, it had happened where I live by 2009. For LGR, he had several years before the gentrification happened in his area.

It’s still possible to find the kind of retro computing stuff LGR used to look for, and I used to look for, especially in accessories and add-ons. But you’ll probably have to look a lot harder, and in many cases, you’ll pay more than you used to.

What about the alien, fatherless, and the widow?

Fortunately for me, I was studying for a very valuable certification right around the time all of this stuff started happening, and I was able to leave that world behind. Similarly, LGR found Youtube. Both of us, independently and several states away from each other, would go back sometimes for fun. But the more time passed, the less I found, and the higher the prices rose. He found the same, as documented in his thrifting videos.

Thrift stores went from being a junk store to trying to be a boutique or an antique store. With prices to match.

Sometimes an independent thrift store comes along and does things the way the old ones did. If you’re fortunate enough to find one of those, enjoy it while it lasts. There used to be two of those near me. Now there is one. The other one got forced out about three years ago. One of the chain stores lost its lease, so they went and bought the lease out from under that independent store.

Shopping at Wal-Mart because they can’t afford Goodwill

I’ve heard people say they shop at Walmart because they can’t afford to shop at Goodwill. And they aren’t joking. The thing is, in 2005, I was shopping at Goodwill because I couldn’t afford to shop at Walmart. And the bigger problem with that is when you adjust for inflation, Walmart isn’t any cheaper than it was in 2005.

So the role that thrift stores play in society was rather different than it was in 2005. It went from being something that anyone could do to meet basic needs and find inexpensive ways to amuse themselves to becoming something only the solidly middle class could afford.

I know some will say the people like me who were making a bit of money off the model ruined it, but I think society ruined it. I stopped profiting off the system when the system decided my hard-earned computer skills were worth the median salary in my zip code. Oddly enough, when I wasn’t able to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, it was a self-avowed atheist who helped me get there.

I don’t know what the people who didn’t find other ways to be paid what they were worth did when the thrift stores squeezed them out of business. They’re probably hanging out at the Goodwill outlet, just making less than they used to.

Most of the stores still don’t open on Sunday, so they haven’t forgotten that. But they have, by and large, forgotten about the alien, fatherless, and the widow.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.