Vintage boutique owner Janelle Best has been rummaging in thrift shop bins since the 90s. When she started, she says, there was a stigma about it. “It was either you were a freak, or you were poor – and I was a freak.”
At first, she did it to source stage outfits while playing in psych-rock bands. Then, in 2005, she started “casually reselling” on eBay. Ten years later she was trading as Desert Stars Vintage at street markets, and by 2023 she had opened a showroom specializing in upmarket silk dresses in her Williamsburg apartment. Even just a few years ago, she says, she still put in the hours at places like Goodwill. The bins, she says, “were a field day. There were so many fucking bangers.” And then, thrifting became a social media craze, she says, “and the hell gates of high school students flooded in. Twelve people to each bin. Everyone fighting. Suddenly everyone’s a reseller, and instead of these kids intuitively knowing what’s good, they’re on their phones trying to figure out if it’s valuable.”
Secondhand clothing has never been more popular. On TikTok, teenage girls post thrift haul videos, gleefully unveiling big bags of clothes acquired for less than $100. Meanwhile, at the top of the fashion food chain, billionaires wear rare vintage pieces to confer status and taste.
Many pin the meteoric rise of secondhand clothing to gen Z, who are reportedly more environmentally aware and entrepreneurial than their elders. The real shift, though, is tech, with platforms such as Depop, the RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Vinted, ThredUp and Poshmark making secondhand buying and selling more accessible than ever.
The tipping point was the pandemic, when screen time rocketed and buying and selling online felt like a rare way to “hunt for endorphins”, as writer and dedicated thrifter Linnea Pejcha describes her own Depop habits at the time. Thrifting surged globally by 28% between 2021 and 2022, and has kept growing since. Revenue is not confined to the apps: Goodwill, North America’s largest thrift chain, with 3,400 stores across the US and Canada, announced a record $7bn in revenue last year, with plans to open between 50 and 100 new stores across North America. ThredUp projects the market will reach $367bn by 2029 – growing 2.7 times faster than the overall global apparel market.
Theoretically, a boom in reused clothing should be unequivocal good news, given the mountains of fabric sent to landfill each year. But many who have been thrifting for decades are depressed at the changes wreaked on some aspects of the industry as it has mushroomed.
For a start, it’s not just plucky rockers selling vintage now. Even some oligarchs are resellers. Client advisers for top fashion brands, the people who deal with shoppers who are spending hundreds of thousands each year, say that some customers have so much swag that they help them, unofficially, to list their wardrobes on secondhand apps as a sales tactic so they can buy new pieces. If they help them “get rid of some of their wardrobe”, says analyst Claudia D’Arpizio, Bain & Company’s global leader of fashion and luxury, “they unlock a lot of potential new buying”.
A new report by Bain found that half of luxury shoppers consult an item’s price on the secondhand market before deciding whether to buy new. In high-end vintage, certain brands may be lost to all but the wealthiest collectors, says Best. Cavalli pieces, in particular, have rocketed in price “probably five times in value in four years”. A few years ago, she says, “all of these rich girls started hoarding brands like Cavalli and Blue Marine”.
Perhaps none of this is new. Like sex, every generation thinks they invented thrifting, says Jennifer Le Zotte, the author of From Goodwill to Grunge, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In the past, a lingering sense of stigma – which Le Zotte attributes to antisemitism and germ theory during the earliest days of secondhand clothing, when Jewish pedlars sold clothes from pushcarts in the 19th century – meant thrift felt like “a resource for rebellion, part of an alternative mindset”. That’s how Le Zotte felt herself when she started doing it, in the grunge era, as did the surrealists in the 1920s, and the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s. “I think every generation for a long time has thought that they’re discovering this, this repository of fashionable possibilities.”
But this vintage boom is different. While it has been great for business in some ways – and has seen celebrities such as Madonna wearing her clothes – Best says it’s still harder to make a living now, with the rise in prices of gas and shipping. Not to mention the wild competition for popular stock – sometimes, she says, vintage hunting feels like “a nepo baby sport”.
Best also has to deal with tariffs. The US market, she says, is now “really dry” so she mainly sources from Italy and France. Yet she has to pay 15% on all imports after Donald Trump got rid of the tariff exemption on imports worth less than $800. She thinks prices are only going to go up: “Because vintage is finite, only so many pieces were made at a certain time, and everyone’s looking for it.”
At the cheaper end of the secondhand market, there are widespread complaints from shoppers about prices, which many say have become unfeasibly high for the low-income shoppers who rely on such stores most. Many of those garments are low quality, poorly made fast fashion. Videos calling out inflated prices, posted with titles such as “Goodwill what crack are you smoking??” have become commonplace. One dedicated Reddit community – ThriftGrift – collates examples, some of which are, frankly, distressing: a Carhartt hoodie covered in stains for $12, a $6.99 shirt, which might feel like a bargain until you spot the wasp’s nest attached to the yoke. Some items still have the original tag so you can see, for example, that the pair of peach, pleated pants priced at $8.99 in Goodwill were priced at $7.99 new. Last month, Goodwill’s western and northern Connecticut branch seemed to confirm its aspirations with the launch of a Thrift Tour, offering a “private bus” to three stores, 30 minutes of exclusive early shopping, lunch, a custom T-shirt, a 20% off coupon and the chance to “meet new thrifting besties” for $75.
Though the thrift shop workers I spoke to for this feature said that some price rises were associated with inflation – costs of labor, rent, cleaning and display supplies have all zoomed up – much of it is also driven by awareness of the booming resale market. Managers have put cheat sheets of brands to look out for on the wall in backrooms; they use resale prices on eBay or Depop to gauge value; and with the image-searching app Google Lens, they are more likely to find comparable items. The days of finding a bargain at the bottom of a bin might be over.
The secondhand fashion ecosystem is vast. It ranges from high-end consignment operations, which authenticate, market and sell clients’ items on their behalf, and take a share of the profit (the RealReal is one such example; current wares include a grey leather Hermès Birkin for $32,000), to independent thrift stores in tiny towns where a shopper might still find a donated pair of jeans for a few dollars. In between those price points are vintage stores (the word “vintage” most commonly refers to garments at least 20 years old), which can get very expensive too – particularly in fashion-centric urban centres such as New York City, which often stock rare Y2K pieces such as 00s Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior. Online, dozens of for-profit sites specialise in high street brands – such as ThredUp, which will send a bag to your house to fill with clothes, which they will sell on commission, and sites, from Poshmark to Depop to eBay, where sellers tend to retain more of the profits if items sell, but also do more of the legwork. There are independent thrift stores that operate for profit, many of which buy items from customers as well as sell them, or donate all or part of their profits to charity; small chains which run as non- and for-profit; and large thrift store chains. The largest for-profit thrift chain in North America is private equity-backed Savers, which has more than 300 stores in the US and Canada, and plans to open another 26 this year. The behemoths in thrift clothing, though, are non-profits: Goodwill and the Salvation Army, which has 887 US stores.
The big beasts of thrift have their critics. Many of those incensed by high prices call Goodwill “Greedwill” online. Some refer to it as a “corporate thrift store”, despite its philanthropic mission, which centres on helping people get into work, and say that it operates more like a for-profit store than a charity. Central among their complaints is the fact that CEOs and other executives – of which there are many hundreds, because Goodwill is not run centrally, but as 150 autonomous regional operations – earn chunky salaries, usually of about $300,000 to $700,000. In a statement to the Guardian, Goodwill said that, in 2025, it helped “nearly 2 million individuals with job training, placement and other support services”. Some of those job placements were with Goodwill itself, though that too is not without controversy: in 2013 it emerged that Goodwill was using a loophole dating back to 1938 to pay disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour. Goodwill has said that while this was legal under section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which allows some people with disabilities to be paid under “a special minimum wage certificate”, it believes “the responsible approach” is to eliminate the use of the certificate in its stores.
Some of those frustrated with the increasingly professionalised thrift economy put the blame squarely on individual resellers entirely for rising prices. Sheri Pavlović, a sustainable fashion expert who shares tutorials on upcycling garments as Refashionista Sheri, says that this can sometimes get ugly on the shop floor. “I’ve been in thrift stores and seen twentysomething cuties, pulling stuff off racks and saying: ‘We could sell this on Poshmark,’ and then seen older people go up to them and say: ‘You’re the reason why it’s so expensive!’ And it’s like, are you kidding me? These little girlies here have nothing to do with corporate prices!” Rather, Pavlović blames the “suits” running big thrift chains who “are getting a whiff of this being popular, trending”. So they hike the prices because they believe they can, she argues, not because they have to.
Robert, who runs a mom-and-pop thrift store in Monterey, California, which serves people on lower incomes, says he has only put its prices up around a quarter of the rate of inflation since the pandemic, despite soaring costs, “because the most important thing for us is customer retention”. He believes the big chains have the scale and brand recognition to charge higher prices, and finds them aggressively competitive: one of them recently put a donation bin near his shop, which has had an impact on donations to his business.
It’s not just resellers skimming off items that may be resold for a profit, either. Many thrift stores have multiple ways of doing the same thing: the practice of “picking” – antique and vintage dealers coming in to buy the best stuff – is well known in the industry, and now many organizations do it for their own websites.
On the price issue, David Eagles, executive vice-president and chief operating officer of Goodwill Industries International, said: “Goodwill does not have one national pricing policy. Prices are set by local Goodwill organizations.” He added: “It is also important to keep the pricing conversation in perspective. We estimate the average retail price per item across the Goodwill network remains below $5. While average item pricing has moved gradually since the pandemic, pricing changes have remained lower than the broader inflationary environment.”
The problems with peak thrift, as this time may become known, extend beyond price. Those donating clothing have enjoyed a sense of virtue from the earliest days of the secondhand clothing market, according to Le Zotte. When Goodwill launched at the turn of the century, its model was tailored to a time of high immigration and wealth inequality. Much like ThredUp today, Goodwill would drop burlap bags at middle class homeowners’ houses, to encourage them to part with their old furniture and clothes which they might then feel free to replace, “without being profligate”.
In an age of fast fashion, though, that sense of virtue appears to be appeasing our guilt about buying new clothing. A recent Yale University study concluded that participation in secondhand fashion often drives, rather than replaces, the purchase of new garments: while 37.2% of people reported increasing clothing donations between 2020 and 2024, there was also a 38% rise in new clothing purchases. This is all a bit at odds with the “moral social buy-in” Le Zotte says many people report feeling when shopping secondhand: “They think that buying the clothing once it enters the secondhand market isn’t being complicit. I’m not saying that it’s totally misguided, but it’s overexaggerated.”
Still, true believers remain. Liisa Jokinen, who runs Gem, an app that aggregates secondhand clothing, insists that “not everything is expensive – but you need to be patient”. She recommends visiting yard sales, clothes swaps, and places where you can still find fill-a-bag sales and shop-by-the-pound stores in person.
Pavlović has abandoned thrifting for now, owing to rising prices, in favor of altering her existing garments to create new items, but she still disagrees with the received wisdom that all the “good” stuff is gone from thrift stores now. “What is good stuff to you is not good stuff to me. I don’t give a shit about the label.” She recommends forgetting the kind of brands shop assistants have been trained to look out for – Zara and Levi’s, for example – and prioritizing personal taste. “When I was thrifting regularly, I was always on the hunt for stuff from the 60s and 70s.”
Pat Noecker, owner of Other People’s Clothes, which has four branches in New York City, got what he describes as his “double PhD in thrifting” when he was touring the US as a musician during the 90s and 00s with bands including Liars, “hitting every thrift store in every town”. He says he keeps prices low for the area (as a guide, Zara pieces are sold for $15.98 to $21.98). His business is “profitable, but no one’s buying yachts”. As a store that buys clothing as well, “we price things to move, otherwise we would need a store the size of a football field”.
He says his clients range from low-income locals from nearby Williamsburg to celebrities, including the band Geese and the first lady of New York City, Rama Duwaji, who comes in to sell as well as to buy. Her taste is “impeccable. She’s super into it. We absolutely love her.” She once dropped off a pair of the mayor’s shoes (Chelsea boots), which Noecker has hung on to: “I don’t wear them but I keep them in my office as a reminder that we have a really awesome mayor, and I send him good luck through those shoes.”
