Thrift Shop Day

Once you find that perfect item you were looking for—or better yet, an item you weren't looking for—that's when you'll really start to understand why thrift shopping is so fun. The fact is the clothes in thrift stores are all inspected to make sure they're in good enough shape to go on the rack, so you don't need to worry about threadbare or tattered items. Thrift stores also offer a bounty of second hand furniture, toys and games, old records and appliances. The combination of the search and the discovery of something new is a feeling that we don't get to experience often in our day-to-day lives.

Salvation Army’s “salvage brigade” launched in 1897 out of the basement of a men’s shelter. Residents went around the neighborhood with pushcarts asking for used clothes, and they got food and lodging in return. A Methodist minister launched Goodwill, a similar operation, in Boston in 1902, hiring poor and disabled people to collect the goods and do any necessary repairs. In turn, the offerings for sale in those groups’ shops gave immigrants a place to find clothes and become “Americanized.” Many thrift stores also offered social-service operations in addition to retail goods.

The first organization one might genuinely consider a “charity shop” was the Wolverhampton Society for the Blind in Staffordshire, England. By the 1920s, thrift stores were as organized as department stores. Consignment shops began to take hold in the 1950s as new synthetic fabrics created a demand for new fabrics and, simultaneously, created mountains of unwanted used clothing.