By: Manal Kashif, SFU Student
Thrifting has long been a way to purchase clothes while keeping it easy on your wallet. Unfortunately, along with its recent rise in popularity, prices of thrifted clothing have also skyrocketed. It’s easy to blame fashion resellers and shop owners for this. However, it’s unfair to say that all fashion resellers are exploitative or the sole reason for outrageous prices. The root causes come from the rise in fast fashion and the state of a consumerist economy.
It is true that many fashion resellers out there are hiking up their prices in an exploitative way, but that doesn’t fully explain the high cost of thrifting nowadays. While a corporation like Value Village, who is owned by Walmart, puts profit above all else, a non-profit or social enterprise that sells clothes and donates its money to charity clearly has a different purpose and shouldn’t be judged the same way. A good example of this is Vancouver-based Miscellany Thrift & Vintage. They are a local for-profit thrift store that believes in giving back quality resources to their community.
When it comes to issues of high cost of living, smaller businesses are also “feeling the effects of inflation and the rising costs of rent.” Rent is due regardless of whether a business made sufficient profit that month, otherwise the business faces being evicted. Commercial buildings also face rent hikes when their leases expire that aren’t controlled adequately. This is a reason why thrift store owners likely feel pressured to increase their prices — to make a living.
The increase in fast fashion has not just made it harder for consumers to find quality clothing in thrift stores, but it also makes it harder for small businesses to stay afloat. A CBC article discussed how “more donations lead to higher prices.” This seems to not make sense at first, because if there’s more inventory, why would store owners need to charge more? The answer is they must pay and hire enough staff to go through piles of donations. There are costs to dispose of unwanted clothes, and many of them end up in landfills. Only 25% of clothing donations in Canada end up being purchased. A large part of this is due to overconsumption in general, which leads people to believe the impact of their unnecessary purchases is offset by donating to thrift stores. This ends up hurting smaller thrift stores the most, as they have less financial means to sort through and sell all their donations.
In response to the oversaturation of fast fashion in thrift stores, many have turned to “thrift flippers.” Thrift flipping is when an individual buys used items from thrift stores and resells them at a higher price, usually on Facebook Marketplace, Poshmark, or Depop. If we were to assess the intentions of individual sellers, we may be tempted to feel some contempt towards them. Depop sellers often thrift top-tier items and sell them at ridiculous prices. However, many of these resellers may be dependent on what they earn from selling online for multiple reasons, with one being that many people need multiple sources of income due to the state of our economy.
It’s easy to point fingers at resellers, but we should consider the time and effort that can go into collecting and curating different styles of clothing. With the number of low-quality fast fashion items saturating thrift stores, it can be helpful to find resellers that offer items without the hassle of picking through an entire Value Village just to find a couple items. This doesn’t change the fact that price gouging is inexcusable from both corporations and resellers, and we shouldn’t have to rely on resellers to find quality clothing. However, the consequences of the global fast fashion industry have bled into thrift shopping, and we should direct our anger towards corporations that uphold the status quo.
Nowadays, many people turn to thrifting for environmental reasons. But finding quality clothing at an affordable price is becoming increasingly difficult — even in thrift stores. This won’t change until we move away from unnecessary fast fashion purchases as much as possible, and push our governments to take action against textile waste.
