What a lifetime of thrifting has taught me about the things we hold dear |
Liz Worth is a poet, author and performance artist.
I’m limping, but I’m here. I’ve had this day marked in my calendar for weeks: A secondhand market on the other side of town. I would hate to miss it, even though I’m in pain. I hurt my ankle jogging the day before.
“Why are we doing this?” my husband asks on the drive over. “You can hardly walk.”
You’d think after 15 years of marriage he would know by now: Nothing will stop me from thrifting. I’m driven by a conviction (or is it a compulsion?) when it comes to secondhand shopping. No garage sale goes unvisited. No thrift store goes ignored. Online, it’s not unusual for me to have at least a tab or two open to Facebook Marketplace and eBay so I can browse between tasks.
My obsession with secondhand shopping started when I was a kid in the eighties. My parents, who had me later in life, were born during the Great Depression. They were raised on hand-me-downs and believed in making things last. My mom’s wardrobe rejected trends and instead represented every decade she’d been alive. My dad’s old undershirts were recycled into washcloths and dust rags when they wore thin.
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It feels like a far cry from today’s world, where so many things seem to become obsolete as soon as you buy them. One of my friends, a teacher, laments the attitudes that many of his students bring to class. They’re rough with everything, he tells me, and they know that anything can be replaced. If their favourite toy breaks, their parents can get another from Amazon within a day.
The internet has made it possible to get pretty much anything you want, whenever you want it, but patience was a hallmark of shopping when I grew up. We mail-ordered from Sears catalogues and order forms on the backs of cereal boxes. There was no overnight shipping: A six-to-eight-week wait was common.
Maybe that’s what helped me develop such patience for secondhand shopping, the success of which relies on being in the right place at the right time. Our summer weekends were spent sifting through garage sales and picked-over flea markets. Sometimes we’d score big, like the red 1960s swag lamp we got for five bucks, or the acoustic guitar we got for 20.
Other times we’d come home empty-handed, disappointed but never discouraged. One time, when I was nine, I ruined a favourite t-shirt digging through a bin at Goodwill that was, unbeknownst to me, covered in some kind of black goo. When I stepped back from my dig my mother looked down and said, “What have you gotten into?” The store manager, baffled, was unable to discern what the mystery substance was, or where it came from.
Still, there were always more benefits than drawbacks to thrifting for us. The generation gap between my parents and I made it difficult to find common ground; secondhand shopping became our bridge. At some point, my dad and I developed an almost psychic sense between us when it came to thrifting. Every so often, we’d look at each other and say, “Do you feel like going to the Salvation Army today?”
Recent research found that a majority of Gen Z consumers planned to shop secondhand for the holidays. The Village........