Thriftflation on the Internet
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Usually, we think of buying secondhand as a way to save money. Clothes that look new are donated by charitable people (or people with too-full closets) and found by others at Goodwills, Amvets, and Savers across the country. But more and more people are taking advantage of online programs like Vinted and Depop to sell their clothes for a much higher price, no matter their condition.
Websites like Vinted, Depop, and Poshmark all brand themselves as places where you can find cute, trendy clothes listed by independent sellers for a lower price than you would pay in store. And while these websites usually are at the front of the month’s trends, they certainly fall short on the promise of lower prices.
You do not have to be looking for issues to notice it, either; go to a thrift store and you'll see cute shirts from nice brands for four to eight dollars. On these online platforms, the same shirt could be listed for over 25 dollars, especially from brands like Brandy Melville, Hollister, or Juicy.
While this is partially the fault of some sellers not understanding the worth of their items, the main variable driving up prices are the fees that these online applications have built into their buying and selling process. Online retailers like Depop can add more than 10 dollars to your purchase—and that's before shipping costs. These retailers also charge a hefty seller’s fee, which motivates users to inflate their prices even if they originally meant to be accessible. This means that in order for someone to break even on an article of clothing that they no longer want, they have to charge potential buyers more than they originally paid. The greed of these companies has made it more difficult to access quality vintage clothing online.
Even though the main factor driving up prices of the average seller is the hidden fees on the website they use, there is another variable making buying used clothes less accessible. Everyone has heard of scalpers for things like Pokemon cards or concert tickets, but this selfish and exploitative practice has spread to almost every consumable good. Scalpers have hit the thrift economy especially hard. People dedicate hours to digging through Goodwill bins and Savers shelves, grabbing anything they can market as rare or niche. The Goodwill bins sell items by the pound for pennies. Even with the seller's fees imposed, scalpers can make quite a bit of money from overcharging buyers.
Why is this a bad thing? Entrepreneurship is rewarded with money, and that's the way of our society. But these scalpers are directly harming the economy they have inserted themselves into. The main problem they introduce is for the people that thrift stores were originally supposed to benefit.
When scalpers come and buy half the store to sell it for five times the price, it forces these stores to, in turn, raise prices. Not only does this erode the purpose of a thrift store, it makes these clothes less accessible for people who may not be able to afford them at market price. Thrift stores are supposed to be cheaper alternatives to retail for people who can’t afford to pay exuberant prices, but these scalpers are not only charging those prices, but raising the prices everyone pays outside of online shopping. Thriftflation is an incredibly negative development for affordability and accessibility.