Looking for an inexpensive way to shop for clothes? Do you need a fun and casual hobby? Thrift Shopping might be a good fit for you. Thrift stores like Goodwill, Savers, and local stores like St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store & Donation Center are good places to visit if you want to find some casual clothes or other miscellaneous items like books or paintings. While it may sound fun to get an iced coffee and go to your closest thrift stores it’s important to keep thrift stores open and available for people who need them.
Thrift stores offer a variety of items often ranging from donated clothes to used appliances. Everything you can find in a thrift store is donated or used, as a result, it all comes at a low price. While this sounds appealing for everyone, thrift stores have a specific target audience. A majority of thrift store shoppers are low-income and rely on the low prices to buy clothes and other necessities. Despite the target audience, there’s a variety of thrift store shoppers. While some go for fun to expand their fashion closet, others take advantage of the low prices and end up hurting the stores.
No one should be discouraged from going thrift shopping. After all, stores need to stay in business so a bit of foot traffic is always a good thing. If you’re a casual thrift shopper you probably spend countless hours looking through the aisles of clothes. While some people are looking for some cute outfits others are looking through the piles with different intentions.
The dangerous personalities of thrift shoppers are taking advantage of the low price thrift store items and a variety of items is changing the state of thrift stores. Who are these people, you ask? They’re the reseller and the oversizer.
That probably doesn’t make sense at first. Who are these people? let me explain:
When you walk into a thrift store what’s the first thing you see? People looking for the perfect item or hidden treasure. If you take some time maybe you’ll find something worth a pretty penny. The Reseller is best known for looking for those hidden treasures and selling them on websites like eBay. From antiques to toys, people buy these items, run a quick google search, and then resell them. “What’s the problem with that?” you may ask. The reseller buys these items for a low price only to resell them and make a profit. How does this affect thrift stores? Well, it ensures the reseller’s profits don’t go unnoticed. This inevitably leads to thrift stores increasing the prices of everything in the store making them less affordable to the people that need low price products.
The reseller isn’t the only parasite in this parasitism relationship. Another is The Oversizer, someone who commonly buys clothes in two or three sizes up as part of a clothing trend. While there are some who buy clothes at thrift stores it’s important to notice the quantity and size of their items. If you aren’t shopping at thrift stores because you’re low income it’s important to keep your shopping bundle low and within your size range. This will help ensure products are there for those who need them. The oversizer is counteracting this because they buy clothes above their size despite the fact that plus size clothing is hard to find and often expensive outside of thrift stores.
The dangerous personalities included within the average range of thrift store shoppers are hard to notice at first. Although you can’t point out their actions at first it’s important to note that their shopping habits will not have an effect until later. The reseller and the oversizer ultimately cause the prices in thrift stores to increase. While that doesn’t sound dangerous at first, it’s important to remember thrift shops are made to provide clothes and other second-hand items at low prices for low-income shoppers. By reducing and preferably stopping the actions of these dangerous shoppers we can keep thrift shopping available to the people who need them.