Secondhand hell 🔥
Hi, is this still available?
[Jump to this week’s song on repeat.]
In moving cross-country again, we’ve spent a solid 2 months toiling away in the depths of secondhand hell. I don’t know when exactly things got so bad and I know I’m not the first to notice this. It’s not even the first time I’ve noticed it myself. I’m just in the thick of it right now as I’m still trying to offload some things the previous owners left behind and find the last big pieces of furniture we need.
When I was younger I had the distinct impression that thrifting was cool; furnishing your home and closet with vintage finds was impossibly chic. It signaled, to me, a keen eye and a strong sense of personal style and taste and understanding of craft. It meant a deep knowledge of the value of an object (monetarily and otherwise), its history, and who created it. I wanted to be the type of person who had a mental rolodex of designers and furniture makers and artists and the movements these objects belonged to. It seemed so adult and worldly and confident to me.
I still feel this way. “Vintage” still seems imbued with a sort of magic and mystique to me — never mind that clothing from my teens is now, technically, considered vintage. But much to my chagrin, I never really managed to become that person. I’m just a bit of a bumpkin at heart, I don’t have the innate elegance for it. It’s ok, I’ve accepted this. But I do still like to buy secondhand, particularly as I struggle against my own consumerist tendencies and learn (or, relearn) how destructive our buying habits can be. A few times in the past my New Year’s resolution has been to only buy secondhand for the year and I’m feeling the urge to give it another go.
The general consensus seems to be that thrifting is much harder these days, though, thanks primarily to fast fashion, fast home goods, and fast furniture. Finding quality pieces always involved some tenacity, but the needle-in-the-haystack nature of it is true now more than ever. There are also more professional thrift flippers in the mix these days, snapping up all the good finds and driving up prices. As a casual thrifter, I don’t really begrudge people who try to do it for a living. I do wonder if it’s worth the hustle, though. It seems to take an awful lot of work to make a buck.
Go to a standard thrift store1 these days and it’s likely you’ll be overwhelmed almost immediately by the sheer quantity of stuff. Sometimes it’s loosely organized by color or type or size — the last of these being essentially meaningless thanks to the nonsensical nature of women’s clothing sizes and the way newer clothing seems to warp if you look at it the wrong way, let alone wash it.2 With enough time and patience, you might find something worth buying, but chances are all the real scores are weeded out during the store’s intake process and sold online anyway.
Selling things yourself isn’t much better, even if you have quality pieces. Bring them to a resale shop and you’re likely to get pennies on the dollar (in store credit) along with a heavy stink eye from the buyer.3 But if you try to sell your stuff online instead, you quickly realize just how awful this experience can be. The promise of tech is always that it will make our lives easier, give us more control and more reach. A lot of the time it does. But I’ve yet to find a resale app or site that doesn’t feel deliberately antagonistic.
There are generally 2 approaches:
First, snap a pic, put in the bare minimum amount of detail, and post it. If the algorithm puts it in front of people you’ll be flooded with messages asking a million questions about it and then ghosting. Making offers and then ghosting. Asking if you can hold it for them, deliver it to them, make special arrangements for them, give it to them for free, and then ghosting. Facebook in particular, with its canned ‘Hi, is this still available’ message, is the worst offender but Depop is particularly loathsome for letting people make an offer and then back out after you accept it. (What, I ask, is even the point??)
The other approach is to invest a ton of work up front to take quality photos, extensive measurements, detailed descriptions of what the thing is made of, its existing quality, the precise nature of any damage or flaws, and so on. You track down what you initially paid for it, what similar items are going for now, and price accordingly. Do this for each item and again hope the algorithm puts your listing in front of people. If it does, you can still expect to field non-stop questions and lowball offers and endless ghosting. I often end up so annoyed by the process I just donate the thing — which I should probably do in the first place.4
The UX of these sites is a mess (Facebook is again the worst offender). Regardless of the app, you’ll get scammers asking if you can email or call them or promoting their own scam storefront in the comments of your listing. As a buyer, browsing is all but useless, imo, the only real way to do it is with laser focused keywords. We need an “ugly shit” filter and I don’t understand why Pinterest hasn’t integrated with one of these apps yet so it can serve you up exactly what it knows you want. Like, let’s put all those years of invasive data collection to good use at least!
I know I sound like a crank. After packing all our stuff, selling a lot of it, and then having to buy a bunch of stuff when we got here, I’m just tired and kind of grossed out by it all. And — yikes — are we feeling the sting of inflation after this past month. Scouring high and low to find things in our price range, new or used, and then getting it and thinking, we paid how much for this? and we still have to put it together? “Enshittification” is the new buzzy word for this. Everything — from the actual products to the experience of getting them — seems to be getting progressively worse, and has been for awhile.
Um…anyway. Idk how to end this on a less bummer note. We’ve found almost all the big pieces we needed for the house, some of them are things we know we’ll end up replacing in a couple years, but a lot of them are pretty nice and will hopefully last a long time! Spending so much in such a short amount of time stresses me out and I’m looking forward to having all the hours I’m currently losing to online furniture shopping back. We’re still over the moon to finally be up here and are absolutely loving it. And for all my complaining I know I can’t quit thrift stores. I just need a little break. More doing, less buying.
Here’s a picture of Otis enjoying a nice stick to make up for the grumblefest ☀️
This week’s song on repeat
If you live in a bigger-than-mid-sized city, you probably have easier access to smaller operations that are more selective with what they buy and offer a more pleasant experience in general. I’m not talking about these (and I’m jealous of you).
When it comes to secondhand furniture, I’m honestly still traumatized from when we once had bedbugs. It was like a decade ago, we think we got them at a bnb in Berlin, but they show up in my stress dreams to this day — I mean it when I say it was traumatizing! I have a really hard time buying secondhand furniture now unless I know the person I’m getting it from personally.
Tbf I’m a freak and kind of like it when I get snobbed on in select venues — coffee shops and thrift stores in particular — I like to gradually win the snob over. But it’s not always welcome. Bike shops, for example, are a bad snob experience. Restaurants are hit or miss. It’s all about the vibe of the snob. It’s hard to explain. Ben thinks this is weird lol, but where else can you confess things like this if not publicly on the internet!?
And on that note: listing things for free on Facebook…my god…the messages…the questions…the requests…take it or don’t!!!! It’s free!!!!!!