Thrift Stores Have Been Gentrified to Oblivion. Are the Vintage Vultures to Blame?

At downtown San Diego’s newest thrift store, digging through other people’s trash is a contact sport.

As the yuppies languish in morning traffic, a fashion-forward group of teens and twenty-somethings formed a line outside the Goodwill Outlet Center, a mid-sized warehouse in East Village that could most accurately be described as a cross between a thrift store and a landfill. The clothes here are arranged in bins – not a hanger in sight – and can be purchased at a rate of $27 for 15 pieces, or $2 a piece. Housewares and glass items are sold by the pound. 

Real bargain hunters know this sacred place as “the bins.” If you’re smart, you’ll wear gloves.

Patrons of the bins may accuse me of “blowing up the spot,” as these outlet stores are ground zero for vintage resellers and collectors on the lookout for hidden gems, but an early morning visit revealed that there’s no gate left to keep. I witnessed about 30 people digging through the iconic blue bins, most of them zoomers clad in cargo pants and camouflage hats. Although, the only “hunting” they’ll be doing is for vintage Levi’s and deadstock tees, more than likely to be resold at flea markets or online with a hefty markup.

Not all vintage resellers and bin shoppers are ethically bankrupt boys who dress like they’ve been cast as an extra in “Mean Girls,” but their prevalence is hard to ignore. Derogatorily known as the “bin boys,” they’re effectively the gentrifiers of thrifting.

“There was a pair of JNCOs and we both had half in hand,” one female Reddit user writes in a forum dedicated to the Goodwill bins. “He ended up ripping them aggressively out of my hands.”

The beef between those who thrift for themselves, particularly for affordability reasons, and the flippers of the world is real. Despite skyrocketing demand for used clothes and a never ending supply of donated goods, thrift store prices are rising, local shops are shuttering and the racks have become fast-fashion graveyards.

The vintage vultures are an easy target, but are they really to blame?

“I do think there is an element of resellers having an impact on increasing the prices, but I think the main thing that you’re looking at is operating costs,” said Brandi Munoz, founder and curator of La Loupe Vintage. “It’s rent, and it’s labor.”

Munoz’s shop opened in Normal Heights in 2011, but she’s been in the vintage game for much longer than that. She recalled a time when Adams Avenue in North Park, which still bears a sign identifying the street as “Antique Row,” actually had antique shops. These days, the area’s better known for $18 cocktails, internet-famous gelato and unattainable Zillow listings.

“The rent used to be cheap over there,” Munoz lamented. “It’s not anymore.”

But it’s not all bad news in the world of secondhand apparel. A few years ago, La Loupe Vintage experienced its first back-to-school season. 

The kids want vintage, and that’s a good thing. 

That’s because the negative implications of reselling – namely, higher costs and slimmer pickings in local thrift shops – pale in comparison to the fashion industry’s impacts on developing countries, overseas workers and our planet at large. About 85 percent of used clothing and other textiles in the United States – which are mostly made of polyester, a type of plastic – go straight to the landfill or incinerator.

Fast-fashion companies like Shein rely on worker exploitation and low-quality materials to produce a product that’s too cheap to compete with. As a result, clothing is more disposable than ever, and consumers are buying more stuff more often because of it.

All of this consumption has placed traditional thrift stores in the middle of a dizzying death spiral.

“As consumers purchase fast fashion from Shein and other brands at unprecedented rates, there is a downstream effect on donation channels like your local Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift store,” said Danielle Vermeer, co-founder and CEO of the TikTok-inspired thrifting app Teleport.

Donated clothes are free, but processing them is laborious and costly, creating an economic anomaly where an excess of supply equals higher prices. As a result, most thrift stores are overrun with overpriced polyester, inspiring many to turn back to fast fashion. The cycle continues.

“Many younger consumers think that they can walk into a thrift store and come out with handfuls of Y2K and designer vintage for $10,” Vermeer said. “But the reality is that most consumers don’t have the time, skill, access, or interest in doing the research, digging, sorting, cleaning, photographing, listing, shipping, customer support, etc. that resellers do.”

Is reselling a perfect solution? Not really. There are certain brands and items that you will practically never find in a Goodwill anymore since they’re now being sidelined to sell at a higher price point online. And some hardcore resellers will go to extreme lengths to find vintage, such as raiding abandoned homes (and reselling their busted-up finds for extreme prices), arguably negating any ethical gains they’ve made by denouncing fast fashion. 

This culture of greed and competition, mainly perpetuated by corporate nonprofits and a few bad actors, has distorted the public’s perception of a practice that does more good than bad.

Curated secondhand from local shops like La Loupe and flea markets such as Lucky Stars in North Park – where the dirty work is delegated to expert hunters – are perhaps the closest thing we have to a marriage of ethics and convenience in modern fashion, bin boys be damned.

Half an hour into my trip to the Downtown Goodwill, the cream of the crop had been stacked high into the boys’ shopping carts, and the remaining shoppers were settling into formation in the corner of the store where fresh bins were periodically rolled out. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, facing one another in two parallel lines spaced just far enough apart for the untouched bins to be pushed in front of them by a reluctant employee.

The resulting frenzy only lasted about a minute before the fresh bin was robbed of its treasures –  its remains destined for the dumpster.