In the last 3 years or so due to the global pandemic and, consequently, labor shortages, supply chain issues, and apparently a whole host of god knows what (I have my suspicions but can’t point to anything concrete) the cost of literally everything has risen. For this reason, many have attempted to avoid the rising tide and jump ship from their native land and transition to new locations where the cost of living is significantly lower while keeping that convenient remote job that pays a living salary suitable for their native state. This is perfectly understandable and I don’t knock anyone for doing so. But I suspect this has naturally gentrified locations that used to be affordable for the locals. So in addition to normal everyday consumer products and services being unaffordable, the housing market has reached absolutely disgusting levels. Landlords, and property owners have decided to not miss out on this great opportunity to extort the populace and have pushed rent costs up well over 50% in some places without consideration for the fact that in that time wages have increased… what, 8-13%? Why not kick that mininum wage havin’ tenant out, bump the price and offer it up as a screamin deal to those nice folk from out of state? Now, some of you with your fancy 100K+ jerbs may not feel the pain immediately and this is not who I’m speaking to necessarily, but I can guarantee that almost all of us are getting squeezed. I would like to share some tips to alleviate some of this pain and suffering and hope to maybe give you some new hobbies and opportunities to have fun in the meantime.

First off, who am I and why should you heed my thrifty advice? Well, 3 years prior to the the start of the global pandemic, circa 2021, I decided I would quit my job and srtike out on my own. I made a small business out of reselling - entirely from scratch. Yup, that’s right, at that time you could do that. I don’t know how feasible it is now or how different the market is these days but at that time I thought it a gold rush of sorts. I was making a comfortable living and had time to learn other skills (other than reselling), find new social groups, and live a good life. This, I believe, is how life ought to be lived in the first place. I was not bogged down from the stress of work, coming home too exhausted to make any lateral moves. I spent a couple hours a day to make a couple hundred bucks or more (7 days a week). The rest of the day was spent growing as a person. However, that’s a subject for another post. What I want to talk about today is what I learned from this foray into thrifting on the business side of things and the skills I obtained that bled into thrifting on the consumer side.

Change your mindset! Most consumers have been conditioned to go from the house to the big store, buy what they want and go back home not thinking once about the quality of the product they’re purchasing, the potential cost savings they could have had and the satisfaction they could have gotten had they chosen to put the effort into finding a product they could be happy with for the rest of their life. Of course that scene has admittedly changed recently and most consumers would say they buy online. However, the rest is true. Most people still buy new. The only thing that has changed is you not getting up off your ass and going to a physical store.

My first piece of advice: Always look to buy used products first and only buy new products as a last resort.

Secondly, take heed of what should be bought new and what should be bought used. I don’t know about you but I’m not looking to buy a used roll of toilet paper. These are not the products that qualify… but there are workarounds to products like these. I’ll explain later. In addition, you don’t need to go overboard with this. Obviously if you spend 6 hours looking for a used product that you could purchase in 15 minutes at a 2 dollar markup you’re wasting your time. The products we’re talking about are items which are typically in the several hundred dollar range. At that pricepoint it absolutely makes sense to take the time to find it used. In other words, when you stand to save more than what you would make at your job in the time that it takes to find the product then you’re saving money and you should buy used. Money Savings is not the only reason to buy used either. I often buy used simply for the quality. I’m not even hinting that “things just aren’t made like they used to” or that vintage stuff is just always better. Sometimes that may be the case, but over all modern high quality stuff is better than vintage high quality stuff due to advancements in engineering and manufacturing… and like… science, dude. It’s just a matter of fact that certain things new are priced similarly to used things that are better quality. You might pay the same price for both but when you consider the higher quality one sold at the same price the lifetime of the two products is really what comes into question.

The best second hand marketplaces for local in-person thrifting:

You will almost always find the best deals at your local thrift shop that isn’t Goodwill. Now, Goodwill certainly has its merits and I’m a huge proponent. But their business model has shifted somewhat since I first began reselling. This can be seen in their hilariously bad attempts to offer “high-end” products at ridiculous mark ups. I realize that doing this is twofold: one reason is to curb the reseller influx with disincentivization, and two is to make more money. However, this is a very, very fine balance. One thing that resellers have on their side is the global marketplace and specialization (these individuals typically know their niche very well). Items that sit on the floor at the same price (or in many cases more) than what the going market price is online will rarely sell because as a physical location the sale relies on the probability that someone who is looking for the exact item will chance upon your store and buy that item at the same price they could have if they’d just found it online used. The only people as far as I can tell that would buy those products are resellers, but if the price is so high that there isn’t a halfway decent margin, they’re not going to waste their money no matter how “high end” the product is. As a successful reseller I always chuckled at how bad their pricers were at nailing down the going market price for items they deem “high-end”. Even without their awful pricing, Goodwill out of their… good will started selling new products. Yes, that’s right, newly manufactured, mass produced junk right there in their store. The quality of these products is a slap in the face and I find it atrocious that they sit adjacent a used product of better quality and lower price. But hey, someone’s buyin’! I digress.

Take a day to tour your city, bring a notebook and jot down all the used thrift shops in town which have potential; those with the best deals, best products, highest inventory throughput (this point is important), and quickest markdown schedule (also important). The more obscured the better. You don’t want resellers with thousands of items in their inventory cleaning up shop on your favorite local watering hole… although there is always room to compete and/or just get what you need when you need it. The other option if you wish to shop locally is estate sales and yard sales. I suppose I can also include flea markets too.

Buying second hand locally in physical locations is very time consuming and it takes luck if you’re looking for something specific. Thrifting in physical locations is a good option for items that are common. This can often be apparel, but the quality will always suffer unless you get lucky enough to find something good in your size, and such luck requires an avid thrifter (maybe you’ll get the itch after this article). But if you’re looking for things like cookware you’re in luck… unless, again, you’re looking for something specific. This brings me to a point that I feel should be made explicit; Thrift locally in physical locations for items whose quality you don’t care about and don’t have anything specific in mind or if you just enjoy thrifting. However, if you are looking for something very specific that you have put time and effort into researching and have decided exactly what you want please, shift your thrift to ONLINE.

Online thrifting is quite a whole new beast. It is a skill that requires some effort to master, but if you do you can be like me and reap the benefits of acquiring extremely high quality prodcuts at a fraction of their newer counterparts. You can usually find these products at 80-95 percent of their original condition but because they’re being sold as “used” they are typically marked down at 1/3rd of the price if not less. Take note that I used to look for these same items to resell but have found that the the skills required to find them is just as useful for finding stuff I want for personal use. So, you should be able to not only find items that are priced low enough to resell but (and much easier) find stuff that is marked at a very reasonable price even if it’s not low enough to resell with good margins.

The best second hand marketplaces for online thrifting:

There exist online marketplaces for very specific niches such as swappa.com who specialize in used electronics and ebay which specializes in nothing. I would recommend both of these by the way. Just because a website does not specialize in a specific niche does not mean that you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for there. You just have to know how to inquire. One of the main problems with broad category marketplaces is they occasionally lack the robust filtering and search features in addition to product guarantees, etc. that might be useful for a particular niche. Swappa for example lets their buyers know that when a phone is listed as unlocked on their site that it indeed means “OEM unlocked” or “bootloader unlocked” not just carrier unlocked. Cell sellers on eBay may not even know of such a distinction and that can make for a baaad buyer experience. Here is a list of sites I use regularly to find exactly what I want. Most of these are broad category sites. I’ll offer my opinions and what insights I have on these.

For everything: ebay.com, offerup.com, mercari.com, facebook.com/marketplace, yourcity/craigslist.org

For apparel: all the above ^^ in addition to poshmark.com, thredup.com, grailed.com (mens apparel)

For used books: amazon.com

For electronics: eBay.com, swappa.com, local facebook.com/marketplace listings

You may know all of the above sites already and may think to yourself, “gee this isn’t helpful, I know this already”, but there are some caveats when using these sites. All are subject to scams that you have to be aware of. Some sites more common than others. I’m lookin at you craigslist. How you use these for each category of thing that you are looking for is crucial as well. I realize there are countless other sites I have missed but these are accessible to most people, have a track record, and are ranked in google. This means your product is searchable with a search engine. But using a search engine is not always the best option either, as google has to crawl the web to index and update sites, and some of the less heard of sites, such as grailed.com won’t get any love for a while even though what you’re looking for exist there.

My favorites for apparel

• Poshmark is my go-to market for men’s apparel. Reason being is that this site is dominated by women’s apparel and most sellers are women selling women’s clothing. This is important because when there is men’s apparel to be sold it sits in a “closet” for ages. The men’s market is miniscule compared to the women’s and this obviously results in far less traffic. Sellers get desparate and drop prices to beautiful lows if you have the patience to wait it out as a man. The user experience is also done fairly well for the most part. I have complaints about their search tactics but for the most part the app and site work well.
  
  I advise people to make an account, edit your size configurations for the various articles of clothing and get to searching. You can use additional filters to narrow down your search, then sort by lowest to highest price and see if they have what you’re looking for. When you’re satisfied it’s returning adequate results you can save the search. This way, you can go back to it later to see if anything else has been newly listed that your saved search qualifies. I believe you can also set notifications to alert you of this as well, but personally I nuked the notifications for this app because… well let’s just say when you first install it there are probably 40 thousand default notifications that are toggled ON. I recommend you leave only the most relevant ones on. When I find something I like I “❤️” it and/or add it to my “bundle”. In most cases the seller will make a reasonable offer in private without you having to haggle or make the first move.
  
  One thing you’ll notice when perusing the listings is that deals don’t look too great initially compared to new stuff elsewhere online. As a Poshmark Ambassador (yes, that’s a thing) I can tell you there is a very specific reason for this and that is, because poshmark does not allow sellers to list items as BIN only (“buy it now” in eBay speak) those sellers get inundated with low ball offers which, from my experience, is usually around half the listed price regardless of how low or high that price is. I don’t know when this became a reasonable starting point for haggling but here we are and it’s impossible to win. For example, if I listed a product at an accurate and well-researched going market price of $100 I’ll receive offers all day for $50, but if I list that same product for $50 or half the going market price I’ll get offers for $25 all day. And here’s the punchline… if I list a product at double the accurate, well-researched going market price I’ll get offers of $100 all day.. actually less often than that, since people have more of a tendency to shy away from higher prices, but those that are thrifty shoppers will make offers. Those are the people that, as a seller, you want to be interacting with anyways. From this insight however, you know that sellers oftentimes expect haggling and low ball offers and will inflate their prices to offset this. But rest assured, many experienced sellers don’t expect to sell their stuff even close to their listing price which is why they go out of their way to make private offers. They exercise what I dubbed prophylactic pricing. So get out there and make some offers! Just don’t be a dick about it. It is often very insulting to lowball just to “see” if a seller will take it. You might get blocked or ignored. This is especially the case when the seller makes a reasonable counteroffer and the buyer counter counteroffers with the same price they initially offered… or a dollar more. This screams bad buyer.You don’t want to be this person.
  
  A few other things to note about poshmark. You can only return items if it was not described correctly or if it was defective in some way. You can’t return items if they simply don’t fit so know your sizes in all the brands you like to shop for. There is obviously some amount of risk when shopping online for clothes and this is a big one when it comes to poshmark. One strategy I sometimes employ (and this very rare) is going to a physical location where they sell the brand I like and trying on clothes to find the sizes that work for me. I’ll then use that as a basis for searching in that brand. It seems underhanded, but hey, I don’t have any shame. Another way I find my size in a particular brand is to go directly to the brand website and follow their sizing suggestions. They’re usually very well laid out and informative.
  
  Another thing is that if you have an unusual body type, you can find amazing deals because again, sellers get so desparate to sell. For instance, I am a very small man with a very small but very wide… foot. And you know what they say about men with very small but very wide feet… That’s right, they got the BIGGEST DIckscounts. I “❤️"ed a pair of brand spanking new boots that retail for $450 one day just because. They were size 7.5EE. The seller sent me a private offer of $200. I didn’t have any special interest in buying them even though I realized it was a great deal.. however, I waited. And then they halfed it! But again… I just waited. Finally they offered me the damn boots for 75 schmackers and I couldn’t pass it up. To this day these are probably my favorite pair of boots I own. This scenario is not that unusual for me either.
  
  Bonus tip: if you’re a man widen your search to include women’s clothing and vice versa. Occasionally you will find a seller that accidentally lists an item for one gender when that model was meant for the other gender. Because the seller doesn’t know why their item isn’t selling, they’ll get desparate again. This technique works very well with shoes that have ambiguous styles. Hell, I’ve messed this one up plenty of times as a seller.

• Grailed is another favorite of mine for men’s apparel. From what I understand they used to specialize solely in men’s fashion but have since expanded their market to women as well. I use this site to find a lot of used high end stuff. It’s not uncommon to see items in the 1k+ range. And unlike Poshmark I would argue that most sellers expect to be paid at the listed price. Very rarely do I receive private offers here. The main reason to shop here is to save on very high end products and not necessarily to save money over all. However, you will still find some incredible deals if you look hard enough. If you have the expendable income to blow a couple hundo here and there but don’t feel justified in spending multiple times that amount for new items this is the place to look. The other reason I like this place is the exclusivity of those high end items on Grailed. You won’t find most listings there cross-listed on other sites like you will with listings from posh and ebay.

• Thredup is not a company I’m very familiar with, but that’s only because they don’t sell men’s apparel, and it makes sense from a business perspective when you consider again how much larger the women’s market is. I’m still hoping they expand one day because I love the concept. Thredup is unique in that, while they also rely on regular users supplying their inventory, they do all the listing, marketing, shipping, etc. by professional listers and other direct employees of Thredup. Regular users simply schedule a pickup to have their clothes picked up in bulk, and Thredup does the rest. You then receive a commission off of whatever sells from your clothes you donated. Services like this are highly convenient but come at the cost of low margins. It really is not meant for resellers, but for the average person mostly wanting to buy used goods and also just get rid of their old stuff this is perfect.

Online Markets For Everything: