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Abstract
In this article, I examine the material and everyday practices of a community of thrift-shoppers at the Goodwill Bins. Their practices reveal that shopping in these cutthroat environments is anything but leisurely. By attending to how these spaces are utilised as resources for independent ventures in the informal economy, I show how the occupation of reselling blurs the lines between consumption and production, and shopping and work. I argue that the thrift store can be viewed as a microcosm of the broader shifts occurring in the economy and the latest capitalist reorganisation of work into non-standard and precarious forms.
Notes
1. NARTS. ‘Resale Thrives in a Slow Economy’. July 8, 2015. https://www.narts.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=329
8. Gregson and Crewe show that secondhand consumption is not anti-consumption but bears a striking resemblance to first-hand consumption; ‘Secondhand’ frequently bears a marked similarity to the practices that shape designer purchasing and consumption in the first cycle: difference, taste and individuality’ (2003): 11. Secondhand buyers commonly perform the well-researched work of savvy shoppers by knowing what a bargain is, and when something is a ripoff. Additionally, extracting a gem from a thrift store or flea market demonstrates the ultimate skill of smart shopping. Gregson and Crewe add: ‘The sale is a manifestation of their learnt and embedded knowledge/s, not imposed by an external value regime.’ (2003): 57.
9. See Appadurai, The Social Life of Things; Stallybrass, Marx’s Coat and Worn Wolrds; Tinkcom, Fuqua, and Villaerjo, On Thrifting; Gregson and Crewe, Secondhand Cultures.
10. See Thompson, Rubbish Theory; Strasser, Waste and Want; Gregson and Crewe, Secondhand Cultures; Hawley, ‘Digging for Diamonds’; Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing; Botticello, ‘Between Classification…’ and ‘Fashioning Authentic Selves’; Brooks, Clothing Poverty.
11. Fontaine describes this process as a ‘psychological economy’; ‘This “psychological” economy compounds the difficulty of precisely defining the value of secondhand objects in circulation. In fact, they incorporate all sorts of value: a value linked to their utility, to their degree of rarity, a value linked to the price of the raw materials of which they are composed or to the cost of the labour involved in their production, and a changing value linked to the age of the object in relation to the fashion cycle’ (2008): 11.
12. Botticello, ‘Fashioning Authentic Selves, 2013.
13. Botticello, “Between Classification…’ 2012.
14. Ibid., 173.
15. Norris traces the life of silk saris as they become too worn or unwearable. She finds secondhand saris command their own trade where they are deconstructed into industrial quantities that are then reincorporated in commodities where the fragments live on as decorations, rather than body coverings. She says, ‘The thread running through all these recent studies is that work is required to make objects suitable for further exchange, once they are no longer suited to their initial use. It is this work that creates new value for used clothing’ (2010): 15. She further explains; ‘For these products to be accepted a sleight of hand must transform the used garment into an antique…The politics and practicalities of hidden transformations are essential for the translation between regimes of value and the creation of new modalities’ (2010): 174. Writing about value and the global trade of used clothes in India, Norris argues, ‘This transformational creation of a second life for old garments itself constitutes an important trans-national flow of materials, an efficacious waste stream of fiber, cloth, color and pattern that bears endless potential to re-create value, yet one that remains largely within an unacknowledged global underworld associated with dirt and decay’ (2010): 4.
16. See Thompson, Rubbish Theory, 1979. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norris also says ‘Clothing must become rubbish in order for such transformations to be successful; their conversion into new consumer goods with high value depends on their being largely conducted in secret, enabling them to move between regimes of value’ (2010): 133.
17. Hawley, ‘Digging for Diamonds’, 2006.
18. Thrift Score, by Al Hoff, formerly a DIY zine by the same name, focuses on the author’s thrifting adventures and argues that thrift stores offer a kind of archaeological dig that excavates the excesses of consumerism.
19. McRobbie’s earliest influential work was on the counter-cultural heritage of London and identifies rag markets as both sources of entrepreneurial employment and street fashion from the ground up in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her attention to post-war subcultures and their relationship to distinctive visual and material culture is one of the only accounts that explains why certain cultural locations and identities were drawn to entrepreneurship and business in vintage. Little has changed from McRobbie’s 1998 description of secondhand clothing to now: ‘Secondhand style owes its existence to those features of consumerism which are characteristic of contemporary society. It depends, for example, on the creation of a surplus of goods whose use value is not expended when their first owners no longer want them. They are then revived, even in their senility, and enter into another cycle of consumption’ (1998): 29. Because of the layers and levels of knowing distinction, McRobbie sees through claims that buying secondhand is anti-consumption and argues the ragmarket is where there is simultaneously ‘an even more refined economy of taste at work’ (1998): 29. Indeed, the market for vintage grew after McRobbie’s publication and is now such a popular market we tend to take its rise to popularity for granted.
20. The authors assert that thrift stores are excellent places from which to think about political economy of material objects as each object in the thrift store provokes questions about its conditions of possibility. The collective line of questioning ‘what is this? What is this for? What does it do? How was it made? Why was it bought and brought into this world in the first place?
21. Mendevev offers a detailed case study of a Savers thrift store in the Midwest where she found that the corporation operating the thrift store actively played up and exploited narratives about cultural capital by advertising its store as a ‘retail melting pot’ and through catering to an explicitly named ‘urban hipster’ demographic.
22. Goldsmith focuses on clothes that are donated to farmers markets in Union Square, NYC.
23. Cline, Overdressed, 2012.
24. Steward, ‘What Does that Shirt Mean to You?’ 2017. Steward also studies shoppers at the Bins in Portland, Oregon and found basically two types of Goodwill Outlet shopper in their narratives: one group she terms ‘thrift seekers’ as their thrifting is a competitive game; the other group she terms ‘creativists’ who thrift out of personal creativity they see as superior to other consumers.
25. LeZotte, From Goodwill to Grunge, 2017
26. As cultural geographers, Gregson and Crewe argue that symbolic location is needed to differentiate between new retail spaces and secondhand spaces, especially when there is overlap between the goods being sold (imitation sharpies, fake designer purses, liquidated backstock of consumer household items, etc.). The role of symbolic location in creating used clothing markets is why, for them, ‘geography matters, fundamentally to the constitution of secondhand worlds’ (2003): 49.
27. Hill, ‘El Dompe’, 2009.
28. Gauthier, ‘The Fayuca Hormiga,’ 2009.
29. Parker and Weber, ‘Secondhand Spaces,’ 2013.
30. Gregson and Crewe, Secondhand Cultures, 2003.
31. LeZotte, From Goodwill to Grunge, 2017. She make the astute observation that secondary markets and salvage operations were typically the domain of recent immigrants, specifically Jewish immigrants, and that the formalisation of an itinerant trade into global non-profits (like Goodwill Industries International and the Salvation Army) worked to Christianise the business of rags (2017): 7. One of LeZotte’s main contributions to this field of literature is through demonstrating the role secondhand exchange, as a profitable industry, has played in the development of infrastructure in nineteenth and twentieth century America, and the development of the twentieth century consumer.
32. See Hansen, Salaula, 2000a, and Hansen, ‘Charity, Commerce, Consumption’, 2008.
33. Milgram also found that bargain hunting for deals and secondhand clothes are not unique to America. Through her ethnographic research among ‘ukay-ukay’ traders in the Philippines, she found that young people especially enjoyed hunting and digging for treasure as a pleasurable shopping activity and routine (2005): 146. She also noticed that savvy shoppers wanted foreign clothes because clothing from the West was known to be stylish and durable. Like Hansen, Milgram also points out that this did not constitute cultural imperialism, however, because the quality of construction and wide variety of styles were actually far superior and cheaper compared with the local market options.
34. Clark’s research also supports Milgram’s findings about the popularity of secondhand clothing imports in Hong Kong in the late 1990s. For my purposes, Milgram’s and Clark’s research, respectively, illustrate that shopping for secondhand clothes is not just a pastime of hipsters (young privileged people), but especially appealing to youths all over the world who use clothing as a medium to express their identities and collective affiliations.
35. Fontaine, Alternative Exchanges, 2008.
36. Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt, 2009.
37. Both Rivoli (Travels of a T-Shirt) and Cline (Overdressed) focus on contemporary secondhand clothing trades as a way to investigate the commodity chain and examine how the fashion industry has changed in the last 30 years. Rivoli does this in order to offer an informative journey into economics and world trade, while Cline does this in order to offer a narrative about ethical consumption.
38. See Tranberg, Karen Hansen, ‘Charity, Commerce, Consumption: The International Secondhand Clothing Trade at the Turn of the Millennium – Focus on Zambia’ in Alternative Exchanges: Secondhand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed Laurence Fontaine. New York: Berghahn, 2008.
39. Hansen explains, ‘As a local phenomena, salaula is part of a countrywide wholesale and retail scene with its own consumption politics and cultural economy of taste and style. And as a global phenomenon, the explosion of Zambia’s salaula trade and its associated trading activities and consumption practices are the products of a little-known, almost entirely unregulated global commodity chain’ (2000a): 249.
40. Hansen, Salaula, 251.
41. Hansen challenges the conventional assumption that developing nations are passive victims of globalisation by highlighting how the secondhand clothing trade in Zambia offers quality and abundance of fashion for cheap, thus allowing Zambians more ways to experiment with expressing their identities. Once we look at how clothes are reused to create idiosyncratic and contemporary fashions we can no longer accept the narrative that people are passive victims of globalisation, where the ‘third world’ is seen as the economic and historical dust bin of the linear progress of ‘first world’ consumption and culture.
She lays out what this process of recommodification looks like: ‘The transformations of the West’s castoff clothing into new garments in Zambia, initiated in interactions at the point of wholesale, continues through the retail process. Unhinged from its origin, the decommissioned value of the West’s discarded clothing is changed anew in the retail process. The process of redefinition hinges on the meaning of the term Salaula – selecting from a pile in a manner of rummaging. Processes that express this are evident, for example on “opening day,” when a bale is cut open for resale, its contents are counted and individual items are assessed for quality and price. At this moment, when the clothes are ready to enter into another cycle of consumption, it is important to remember that they have not been meddled with. Both traders and customers prefer to open bales publicly, so that customers can select on the spot. A bale that is opened in the market in full view is considered to contain “new” garments. If it were opened privately at home, the trader might put aside choice items, causing customers to suspect that they are being presented with a second cut and not “new” clothing’ (2008): 182. Hansen follows the transformation of secondhand clothes from discards into desirable garments and investigates a central link in the commodity chain: the role of tailors. She illuminates that tailors set up as an ancillary industry alongside Salaula markets and help translate the foreign used clothes into updated and stylish one-of-a-kind garments for the discriminating Zambian. She also says, ‘In recent years the clothes displayed in the boutique section of Lusaka’s salaula markets are hung up “fresh” from the bale, that is, with wrinkles and fold. Prewashed and ironed clothing in the opinion of traders and customers alike leaves the suspicion that the clothes are “thirdhand,” meaning previously owned and worn by Zambians’ (2008): 183.
42. See Hart, ‘Informal Income Opportunities,’ 1973; De Soto, The Other Path, 1989; Castells and Portes, ‘World Underneath,’1989; and Portes and Haller, ‘The Informal Economy,’ 2005.
43. See Boruchoff, ‘Latin Americans at Home Abroad,’ 2008; Galemba, ‘Informal and Illicit Entrepreneurs,’ 2008; and Marcelli et al., Informal Work in Developed Nations, 2010.
44. Birkbeck, ‘Self-Employed Proletarians in an Informal Factory,’ 1978.
45. Yang, ‘At the Bottom of the Heap,’ 2015.
46. Samson, ‘Accumulation by Dispossession and the Informal Economy,’ 2015.
47. Medina, The World’s Scavengers, 2007.
48. Millar, ‘Making Trash into Treasure,’ 2008.
49. Stack, All our Kin, 1974
50. Duneier, Sidewalk, 1999.
51. Valenzula, ‘Day Labourers as Entrepreneurs?’ 2001.
52. Stoller, Money Has No Smell, 2002.
53. Venkatesh, Off the Books, 2006.
54. Ferrell, Empire of Scrounge, 2006.
55. Zlolniski, Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists, 2006.
56. Gowan, ‘New Hobos or Neo-Romantic Fantasy?’ 2008.
57. Zukin, Naked City, 2010.
58. Wescoat Sanders, ‘Junks Last Chance,’ 2004.
59. Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966): 12.
60. Ibid., 48.
61. Ibid.
62. See Gregson, Brooks, and Crewe, ‘Narratives of Consumption and the Body,’ (2000): 112.
63. Hoff, Thrift Score, 1999.
64. Gregson, Brooks, and Crewe, ‘Narratives of Consumption and the Body,’ (2000): 109.
65. Ibid., 107.
66. Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste (2006): 3–4.
67. Reno, ‘Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure,’ (2009): 33.
68. Ibid. (2009): 40.
69. Sassen, ‘The Informal Economy,’ 1991.
70. Ibid. (1991): 94.
71. Ross, Nice Work if You Can Get It (2009): 11.
72. Ibid. (2009): 6.
73. Ibid. (2009): 9.