Vintage boutique owner says thrifting boom has made secondhand fashion more competitive

Vintage boutique owner Janelle Best has been rummaging in thrift shop bins since the 1990s. She says there was once a stigma around it: “It was either you were a freak, or you were poor – and I was a freak.”

She first thrifted to source stage outfits while playing in psych-rock bands. 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 a few years ago, she says, she still spent hours at places like Goodwill. The bins, she says, “were a field day. There were so many fucking bangers.” 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, showing bags of clothes bought for less than $100. At the top of fashion, billionaires wear rare vintage pieces to signal status and taste.

Many attribute the rise of secondhand clothing to Gen Z, who are said to be more environmentally aware and entrepreneurial than older generations. The real shift, though, is technology, 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 soared 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.

In theory, a boom in reused clothing should be good news, given the mountains of fabric sent to landfill each year. But many people who have been thrifting for decades are depressed by the changes the industry has undergone as it has expanded.

It is no longer just rockers selling vintage. Even some oligarchs are resellers. Client advisers for top fashion brands say that some customers have so much swagger that they help them, unofficially, list their wardrobes on secondhand apps as a sales tactic so they can buy new pieces. Analyst Claudia D’Arpizio, Bain & Company’s global leader of fashion and luxury, says that if they help them “get rid of some of their wardrobe”, “they unlock a lot of potential new buying”.

A new Bain report 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, some brands may be out of reach except for the wealthiest collectors, says Best. Cavalli pieces, in particular, have risen “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”.

Jennifer Le Zotte, author of From Goodwill to Grunge and a professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, says every generation thinks it invented thrifting. In the past, lingering stigma, which she links to antisemitism and germ theory during the earliest days of secondhand clothing, meant thrift felt like “a resource for rebellion, part of an alternative mindset”. She says she felt that way 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.”

This vintage boom is different, however. Best says that while it has helped business in some ways, and has even put celebrities such as Madonna in her clothes, it is still harder to make a living now because of higher gas and shipping costs. Competition for popular stock is fierce, and vintage hunting sometimes feels like “a nepo baby sport”.

She also has to deal with tariffs. The US market, she says, is now “really dry,” so she mainly sources from Italy and France. But she pays 15% on all imports after Donald Trump removed the tariff exemption on imports worth less than $800. She expects prices to keep rising: “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, shoppers widely complain that prices have become too high for the low-income customers who rely on these stores most. Many of the garments are low quality, poorly made fast fashion. Videos criticizing inflated prices, with titles such as “Goodwill what crack are you smoking??”, are common. One Reddit community, ThriftGrift, collects examples, including a Carhartt hoodie covered in stains for $12 and a $6.99 shirt that is less of a bargain once you notice the wasp’s nest attached to the yoke. Some items still have the original tag, showing, for example, that peach pleated pants priced at $8.99 at Goodwill were sold new for $7.99. Last month, Goodwill’s western and northern Connecticut branch launched 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.

Thrift workers interviewed for the feature said some price rises were tied to inflation, including higher labor, rent, cleaning and display costs. But they also said awareness of the booming resale market is driving prices higher. Managers have put cheat sheets of brands to watch for on the wall in backrooms; they use resale prices on eBay or Depop to gauge value; and with Google Lens they are more likely to find comparable items. The days of finding a bargain at the bottom of a bin may be over.

The secondhand fashion ecosystem is vast. It includes high-end consignment operations that authenticate, market and sell clients’ items on their behalf and take a share of the profit, such as the RealReal, where current wares include a grey leather Hermès Birkin for $32,000. It also includes independent thrift stores in small towns where shoppers may still find donated jeans for a few dollars. Between those price points are vintage stores, which often get expensive too, especially in fashion-centric cities such as New York City, where rare Y2K pieces like 2000s Jean Paul Gaultier and Dior are common. Online, dozens of for-profit sites specialize in high street brands, including ThredUp, which sends a bag to your house to fill with clothes they will sell on commission, and platforms from Poshmark to Depop to eBay, where sellers tend to keep more of the proceeds if items sell, but also do more of the work. There are independent thrift stores that operate for profit, many of which buy items from customers as well as sell them or donate some or all profits to charity; small chains that run as non- and for-profit operations; 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 major players in thrift clothing, though, are non-profits: Goodwill and the Salvation Army, which has 887 US stores.

The big thrift operators have critics. Many people angry about high prices call Goodwill “Greedwill” online. Some call it a “corporate thrift store,” despite its philanthropic mission centered on helping people get into work, and say it operates more like a for-profit store than a charity. A central complaint is that CEOs and other executives — of which there are many hundreds, because Goodwill is not centrally run but operates as 150 autonomous regional organizations — earn large salaries, usually 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 placements were with Goodwill itself, though that has also been controversial: in 2013 it emerged that Goodwill used a loophole dating back to 1938 to pay disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour. Goodwill 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 people frustrated with the increasingly professionalized thrift economy blame 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 become 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!” Pavlović instead blames the “suits” running big thrift chains who “are getting a whiff of this being popular, trending.” She argues they raise prices because they believe they can, not because they have to.

Robert, who runs a mom-and-pop thrift store in Monterey, California, serving lower-income shoppers, says he has raised prices only about a quarter as fast as inflation since the pandemic, despite soaring costs, because customer retention matters most. He believes big chains have the scale and brand recognition to charge more, and says they are aggressively competitive: one recently placed a donation bin near his shop, affecting donations to his business.

It is not just resellers skimming items that may later be resold for profit. Many thrift stores have multiple ways of doing the same thing: the practice of “picking,” where antique and vintage dealers come in to buy the best items, is well known in the industry, and many organizations now do it for their own websites.

On pricing, 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 era may become known, go beyond price. According to Le Zotte, donating clothing has long carried a sense of virtue. When Goodwill launched at the turn of the century, its model was suited to a time of high immigration and wealth inequality. Like ThredUp today, Goodwill would leave burlap bags at middle-class homes to encourage people to part with old furniture and clothes they might then feel free to replace “without being profligate”.

In the age of fast fashion, that sense of virtue appears to help soothe 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. Le Zotte says this is a little at odds with the “moral social buy-in” many people feel 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, says that “not everything is expensive – but you need to be patient.” She recommends yard sales, clothes swaps and in-person fill-a-bag sales and shop-by-the-pound stores.

Pavlović has stopped thrifting for now because of rising prices and is instead altering her existing garments to create new items, but she still rejects the idea that all the “good” stuff is gone from thrift stores. “What is good stuff to you is not good stuff to me. I don’t give a shit about the label.” She recommends ignoring the brands shop assistants are trained to watch for, such as Zara and Levi’s, and focusing on 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, says he got what he calls his “double PhD in thrifting” while touring the US as a musician in the 1990s and 2000s with bands including Liars, “hitting every thrift store in every town.” He says he keeps prices low for the area, with Zara pieces sold for $15.98 to $21.98. His business is “profitable, but no one’s buying yachts.” As a store that also buys clothing, “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 buy. Her taste is “impeccable. She’s super into it. We absolutely…”