Photo by Noémie Roussel on Unsplash

Remember when thrifting used to be the cheaper alternative to shopping firsthand? Gone are the days of filling up big plastic Goodwill bags for only $20. Nowadays, we’re in a thrift era of $40 Carhartt hoodies and $100 knockoff Fendi Baguette bags. When you can buy a T-shirt at H&M for the same price as from the racks at Salvation Army, the price differences between fast fashion and thrifting have begun to blur.

But why does it have to be like this? One consensus among thrift shoppers, online second-hand shoppers and observers is that “resellers” are to blame. “Reseller” is a term that describes people who buy cartloads of items at thrift stores with the sole intention of reselling them through online platforms like Depop and Poshmark. With the inflation of thrift pricing, observers have called this new era “gentrified thrifting,” likening resellers to landlords. After all, thrift stores were initially created to make shopping more accessible for low-income people, right?

In actuality, more studies point toward mass production as the leading cause for the origin of thrifting. According to a JSTOR Daily article, “thrift stores drove awareness of charitable giving and helped American consumers come to terms with an increasingly mass-produced, disposable economic system.” The article goes on to describe how thrifting even justifies mass consumption by rebranding it as “charitable.”

With that being said, thrifting has always been about consumption and production. Even though they may not add to the amount of clothing production, thrift stores were created as a solution to overproduction that still allowed for overconsumption. That makes thrift stores cyclical: overproduce a garment, overconsume a garment, dispose of it and then overconsume it again once it makes its way back to the Goodwill bins.

Still, the dubious sustainability culture surrounding thrifting doesn’t explain rising prices. Many are convinced that resellers are to blame for inflation, but they have little to do with thrift pricing.

Though resellers may be unethical, their practices aren’t forcing the hands of any thrift store. According to Fashionista, only about 20% of all donated clothing actually ends up in thrift stores. The rest are burned or end up in massive landfills. To put that into perspective, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, in 2018 seventeen million tons of textiles were produced. That same year, 11.3 tons of textiles entered landfills. The main source of these textiles was the clothing industry.

With all of that being said, thrift stores still have no reason to raise prices. They don’t have to “compete” with resellers who buy racks of clothing at one time because they have an unbelievable excess of clothing. According to an article by the Washington Post, the only researched examples of thrift inflation come from corporate thrift stores – think Goodwill and Salvation Army. That means that no matter how “gentrified” thrift stores become, with affluent people thrifting for fun rather than necessity or resellers snatching up every name brand they can get their hands on, thrift stores have no reason to raise prices.

Observers are misdirecting their anger. By putting all the blame on resellers or those who thrift for fun, we are ignoring the looming fact: corporate thrift stores can afford to keep their prices low – even as thrift popularity increases – due to the overwhelming amount of textile waste that is donated every year. The real villains of thrift inflation aren’t the college students who want a cheap blouse or the resellers trying to make a quick buck, but rather the corporate greed that permeates even the most “ethical” businesses.

Ultimately, the most ethical and sustainable means of shopping aren’t accessible to most people, and many shops aren’t transparent with their customers. For now, the most sustainable thing we can all do is try to limit our consumption. Thrifting will probably remain the most accessible form of ethical consumption.