Featured Someone found at a Goodwill

I hate that the good stuff mostly doesn’t make it to the thrift shelves anymore but it makes sense. Big retail stores used to sell their overstock go TJ Maxx and Marshall’s. Then big retail started dying a quick death. Oddly off price stores like Maxx and Marshall’s started doing better and better. People want a deal. The big retail stores took notice and now many have their own discount spin-off or factory store. Like Nordstrom’s Rack for example. Instead of selling their end of season and overstock to Maxx and letting them profit, they just keep it and profit themselves. When thrift stores saw resellers making lots of money off their inventory they decided they should be keeping more of that profit. Kind of the same with Ticketmaster. They saw people scalping the tickets and making lots of money in the secondary market and they just because the secondary market. Corporate America hates the small guy making a buck anywhere. They will stamp us out and vacuum up every dollar they can. It makes good business sense. I mean I am a reseller but we did kinda ruin thrift stores, both for ourselves and for the people that relied on them. It was an unglamorous, tedious, dirty way to make a buck but somehow during covid YouTube videos and social media made it all the rage. I think it was just one of the only things you could still do during covid. Everybody wanted an under the table side hustle while they were collecting and thrift stores were one of the only public places you could go and kill some time. The prevalence of YouTube and social media personalities combined with covid made for the perfect storm. On a smaller scale no one took much notice but with reselling stories broadcast everywhere online it was impossible to turn a blind eye. It was probably gonna happen anyways. Every industry is getting leaner and more efficient as time marches on. For the folks that have been harvesting gold literal and figurative from thrift stores for a long time, feel lucky you got in when you did!

 

Thrift stores ain't so thrifty these days. The stories about the scores may have sped things up, but it was going that way anyway. My local ones pulled the jewelry from the stores, any jewelry, a good year before Covid hit. They'd already gotten onto the greed gravy train.

All of the good leftover scores disappeared from off-price retailers years ago. They don't sell "seconds" any more and you'll never see a "first quality" tag these days; the seconds had minor defects that were usually easy enough to fix if you needed to. To find the scores you USED to get in off-price stores you need to find a regional chain job lot store and hope.

 

We're starting to hit antique malls again,getting our steps in looking for one thing that really grabs us.It's rare to find something stunning and affordable- but if we can at least break even if we need to sell,that's a bonus.
Course if there's a global depression,to paraphrase a former President-"Tchotchkes can no longer protect us !"

 

There's only one very small mall near me that's accessible. Mostly they cater to millennials so there isn't much for the likes of us.

 

Ditto Ruth-It's a bit depressing to walk into a Mall where everything's 80's or newer,and the rest is repro.

 

Well, 60s or newer, but close enough. The jewelry is 80s and newer. No repro stuff that I saw, just legitimately newer.

 

There's one local downtown Mall that I'd guess is probably 90% shabby chic/farmhouse chic repros.Think Hobby Lobby pseudo-antiques.

 

Ewwwww. No. Just no.