“There’s all these clothes out there, but it’s just that they may not be as durable as you would like,” Mr. That means that what does get sold on the store’s floor - which is usually 20 percent of donations - is priced higher to make up the cost of running the store. Inventory and space issues mean more clothes need to get either sold into the export market for a lower cost or disposed of, which has a financial cost, he said. Stores need more employees and more time to sort through the clothes. But an increase in donations has led to increased business costs. He said his research had shown that thrift stores have no shortage of donations, especially in recent years. He added that smaller stores in particular could easily become overwhelmed by incoming garments, making it “much harder to do the business of running a thrift store.”

“If you donate trash to a thrift store, it doesn’t just disappear,” Adam Minter, the author of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale,” said in an interview.

Although it’s a better option than sending clothes straight to a landfill, she said, thoughtless donating can direct lower-quality items to people who really need them, while also driving up thrift stores’ operating costs. “And there’s no way that all of those items are going to be constantly worn.”īecause of the rise of thrifting, what isn’t worn ends up getting donated, Ms. “Those hauls just encourage overconsumption,” Ms. “Like stained fast-fashion clothes that nobody wants.” But even now, she has still been finding fast-fashion items, sometimes with tags still on them, hanging on the racks. “I’d go into thrift stores thinking I could find a few things for my wardrobe or for my family, and it would just be absolute, you know, garbage on the racks,” Ms. Early in the coronavirus pandemic, she began to notice that her local thrift stores in Lincoln, Neb., were filling up with items from Shein, LuLaRoe, Fashion Nova and other fast-fashion brands, whose garments tend to be relatively inexpensive, often adapting designs from small shops and high-end labels.Īt the time, she assumed it was because people were cleaning out their closets while stuck at home. All of her clothes, except for her socks and underwear, were purchased secondhand.īut lately, “there’s just less and less desirable items,” Ms. Most of the furniture and décor in her home came from thrift stores. Koeppe has carried the thriftiness of her youth into adulthood. Now in her 40s and with a daughter of her own, Ms. When she was younger, she would spend weekends going to thrift stores with her mother, hunting for unique trinkets and garments but mostly looking for quality items to fit into her family’s tight budget.

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