The Social Contract of Thrift Stores: Do Resellers Go to the Bad Place?

In which we decide the eternal fate of Macklemore’s soul

I scored big at my local thrift store today. I found a gallon Ziplock bag stuffed full of L.O.L. dolls and accessories. If you have a daughter under age 14, you’re well aware that a 3-inch L.O.L. doll in its original (and excessive) packaging costs around $12. Since the dolls are a “surprise” (a nifty Skinner Box trick that compels people to keep buying and buying in hopes of completing their collection), people frequently resell duplicate dolls for around $10 each.

And I got the whole bag for 50 cents.

If I were a reseller— someone who scours thrift stores for hidden gems in order to resell them at a huge profit— I could have made upwards of $100 from this find. But I’m not. I just want to bribe my stubborn 3-year-old to poop in the potty.

Right after I made this fortuitous discovery, an old guy started chatting with me about the comparative merits of the local thrift shops. I like talking with weirdly enthusiastic strangers, so I didn’t mind. Midway through the conversation, though, he casually mentioned that he is a reseller.

Now, I am a very nice person. If someone unexpectedly revealed to me that they were a convicted murderer, I would tilt my head sympathetically and say, “That must be hard.” So I did not tell this man that he is a leech on society, the trailer-trash equivalent of a hedge fund manager who moves money around the stock market but contributes nothing of practical value to humanity.

I have no idea what hedge fund managers actually do, but I’m pretty sure I don’t approve of it.

There he was, scrounging around in the kitchenware section amongst the mismatched utensils and the knob-operated microwaves, while I had a hundred bucks in glittery baby-sexpot dolls in my cart. If he only knew what I snatched right from under his nose! He lacked the expertise necessary to recognize the dolls’ value, expertise which only comes from the lived experience of trying so desperately to appease a fiery 21st-century girl-dragon that you abandon all your pre-parenthood ideals about feminist toys.

I’m just really tired of cleaning up poop, OKAY?

The very pressing question I wish to address is this: what is the social contract of thrift stores? And do resellers violate it?

I’m no expert in social contract theory, but I did skim a Wikipedia article about it a few minutes ago. I’ve also watched The Good Place several times, so I’m familiar with Chidi’s summary of T. M. Scanlon’s book What We Owe to Each Other.

I think it had something to do with chili recipes.

To begin, we might ask, for whom do thrift stores exist? When I first started thrifting, I felt a little guilty about it because I wasn’t sure it was meant for me. I grew up as a member of the socioeconomic class that only donated to thrift stores. We certainly never shopped there, except perhaps to piece together a hobo costume for Halloween. Goodwill was the place you dropped off all your old junk when your mom went into a Spring Cleaning frenzy. We felt very good about giving our junk to The Poor who, if not for our generosity, would probably have to fashion loincloths out of dirty McDonald’s bags they found beside the highway

I don’t exactly need to shop at a thrift store. I could supply the necessities of life for my family by shopping at the mall, or at least at Target. But I like it. It allows me to indulge my consumerist impulses without aggravating the husband too much. (His main complaint is that our house becomes cluttered with thrifted toys and decorations, so our agreement is that I have to donate as much as I buy. I don’t do a great job of sticking to this agreement.) I also love the thrill of a good find. It’s the closest a housewife can get to digging up pirate treasure.

Yarrr! ‘Tis a genuine Lacoste polo in 4T!

I instinctively dislike resellers because their interests run counter to mine. They take the good stuff before I can get to it. I find time to go thrifting maybe once a week, and then I only have time to visit one or two shops. I search the specific sections where I hope to find items of use or enjoyment for myself and my family. The serious resellers are there every day. They know which shops have the best selections of which items, and they know when the sales are. They search the whole place and fill their carts with anything they can hock on Facebook Marketplace. Aren’t my motives purer than theirs?

If the purpose of thrift stores is to clothe the naked, as some donors suppose, then both I and the resellers are in violation of the social contract. If that purpose extends to anyone who thrifts items for their own personal use—including middle-class housewives—then I’m in the clear, while resellers are still bound for an eternity of butthole spiders and penis-flatteners.

You’re going to miss a lot of my references if you haven’t watched The Good Place, sorry.

Maybe this theory is all wrong, though. Maybe thrift stores don’t exist for the poor at all. Maybe they exist to give us a place to dump our junk without feeling guilty about our own wastefulness.

In that case, it doesn’t really matter what we do with the detritus of consumerism. If we put it to any use at all, that is noble and rebellious, a slightly more sanitary version of Dumpster diving.

Slightly

Perhaps resellers take maximum advantage of the wasteful rich by turning around and selling their own trash back to them.

To be fair, thrift stores often give part of their proceeds to charity. There is a grain of truth in the humanitarian fantasy of thrift store donors. They think they are clothing the naked with their outgrown Lululemon leggings, when actually they are clothing me, while only incidentally providing the homeless with a fraction of a bowl of soup and a free Bible. This veneer of charity can be pretty thin. Some thrift stores are for-profit businesses that exaggerate their charitable mission in order to provide a warm-fuzzy incentive to their customers.

I do think supporting thrift stores through donations AND shopping--moreso the shopping--is morally good, but not because they clothe the naked and feed the hungry. It's because they provide a buffer between the back of your closet and the landfill. They give us the chance to rescue valuable items from the trash and reduce our demand for new goods.

Maybe I and the resellers are violating the social contract that donors believe they are entering when they magnanimously deposit their trash bags full of mangy stuffed animals and "skinny clothes" they've given up ever wearing again at the back door of the Salvation Army. But it's a social contract based on a false premise of the true function of thrift stores, so I don't really care.

This brings us to the most important question: where will Macklemore’s soul spend eternity?

Let’s take a closer look at the lyrics of “Thrift Shop.”

Draped in a leopard mink, girls standin' next to me
Probably shoulda washed this, smells like R. Kelly's sheets
(Piss)
But shit, it was ninety-nine cents! (Bag it) Coppin' it, washin' it
'Bout to go and get some compliments
Passin' up on those moccasins someone else's been walkin' in them
Bummy and grungy, fuck it man, I am stuntin' and flossin' and
And savin' my money and I'm hella happy that's a bargain, bitch

 [ . . . ]

Thank your granddad for donating that plaid button-up shirt
'Cause right now I'm up in her skirt

In these passages, the speaker reveals that his motivation for thrift shopping is to attract members of the opposite sex with his original style while saving money.

But that’s not his only objective:

I could take some Pro Wings, make them cool, sell those
The sneaker heads would be like Aw, he got the Velcros

Although the speaker seems primarily interested in thrifting items for his own personal use, he doesn’t hesitate to use his street-fashion savvy to refurbish and resell his finds for a profit.

Macklemore is both a personal-use thrifter AND a reseller.

Towards the end, he reveals another, more political purpose to his thrifting:

They be like, Oh, that Gucci. That's hella tight
I'm like, Yo that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt
Limited edition, let's do some simple addition
Fifty dollars for a T-shirt, that's just some ignorant bitch (Shit)
I call that getting swindled and pimped (Shit)
I call that getting tricked by a business
That shirt's hella dope
And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
Peep game, come take a look through my telescope
Trying to get girls from a brand? Then you hella won't
Then you hella won't 

Watch the music video if you somehow haven’t already. Observe his jubilance as he bounds across tufted armchairs, his fur coat streaming majestically behind him. This is a man who has tapped into the deep heart of thrifting and found a well of joy. We should heed his wisdom.

Housewives, resellers, frugal fashion visionaries: we all engage in a radical and commendable act when we find value in the debris of our throwaway culture.

Conclusion: Macklemore belongs in the Good Place.

Ora pro nobis 

Anyway, this is what I like to believe, because it makes me feel better about all the thrifted L.O.L doll accessories littering my living room floor.