The Thrift Store Edition
On TikTok, Hollister, and Colson Whitehead.
Jason Boog (JB) is the senior manager of editorial at Fable, a social reading platform for book clubs. He is also the author of Born Reading: Bringing Up Bookworms in a Digital Age, and multiple WITI contributions, including The Digression Edition and The Euchre Edition.
Jason here. One spring day in 1902, the New York Sun ran a leisurely and colorful story about the many different characters you’d meet inside a Brooklyn Salvation Army, all taking in “the cheapest department store in the city.” At the time, the country had been embroiled in the bloody Philippine–American War for three years, and an energy crisis loomed as 147,000 coal miners prepared to strike. The country would officially enter a recession later that year.
As the world wobbled on its axis, this Brooklyn thrift store owner cataloged his regulars. He began by bemoaning the profiteering shoppers “who come in to get a coat for a quarter, which they will immediately pawn for a dollar.” More than a century later, these canny resellers thrive on social media as they chase luxury brands, breathlessly recount thrift-store pricing blunders, and share tips for aspiring thrift store influencers. The 1902 article also recounts how a “bargain-hunting throng” descended twice a day to comb through an area with new, not-yet-priced offerings. These days, the same throng explores Goodwill bins in unglamorous thrift store backrooms, where customers can reach Black Friday levels of consumer aggression as they purchase clothes by the pound.
Out of all these characters, I fell in love with a gum-chewing teenager looking for shoes to wear at the big dance: “Hump them slippers down here,” she tells the store owner in her turn-of-the-century hipster patois, proudly purchasing a bargain-priced pair of bronze heels. Her spiritual heirs now make thousands of “Thrift with Me” videos, featuring twee scavenger hunts at the local Goodwill, interactive ride-alongs with fistfuls of cash, and earnest road trips sponsored by major automobile brands, collectively stuffing TikTok’s #thrifting tag with more than 3 million videos.
Why is this interesting?
Thrift stores are cool again. So much so that the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a “Turning Thrifty” report in May 2026, marveling at all the millennials and Gen-Zers who flock to thrift shops. The major resale website ThredUp launched a thousand trend pieces with its 2026 Resale Report, reporting that “62% of Gen Z shopped secondhand in 2025” while predicting that the worldwide secondhand apparel market will grow to $393 billion in the next four years. You could spend a whole WITI newsletter mapping the economic currents that sweep us toward thrift stores — the recession of 1902 or the inflation of 2026, for starters — but I’d rather talk about books instead.
The great novelist Colson Whitehead finished his Harlem Trilogy this summer with Cool Machine (happily in development as an ongoing series at Apple). These crime novels covered 30 years in the life of a furniture salesman who also fenced stolen goods, his identity teetering between upstanding businessman and crook. The final installment is set during the grittiest years of the 1980s, and Whitehead’s hero rhapsodizes about the revival of Argent, a beloved mid-century furniture brand. “Open up a newspaper and take your pick. The energy crisis, the hostages — it was a marathon of disaster,” he explained. “People needed Argent again for proof that there had been good times before the bad times.”
That quote landed for me as my daughter discovered thrifting recently, selling her outgrown clothes on Depop, a marketplace where young entrepreneurs list 45 million “preloved” items. She even helped her younger brother dig for Hollister and Carhartt clothes in secondhand stores around town. The self-assured teenager from 1902, “chewing gum and surveying the stock with critical indifference,” is alive and well today.
As I followed my kids through the local shops, I regaled them with tales of my own thrifting adventures: spending 25 bucks for a vintage senior prom suit, losing my thrifted Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction tee after a disastrous sleepover, and listening to a secondhand Bruce Springsteen record as I plotted my escape from small-town Michigan. Throughout the “marathon of disasters” I’ve already lived through, thrift stores have always felt like home. (JB)
A Bonus: T-Shirt of the Day
While thrifting in college, I ironically purchased this Richard Marx concert tee. However, I soon discovered that it was the perfect conversation starter at parties. No matter what kind of room you walked into, everybody would talk to you about that one song. It can be yours for $115 on Etsy!
Quick Links:
I found this KLF single while digging through a box of records at a local thrift shop. It’s another bit of 1990s ephemera, made even more ephemeral by the fact that the band destroyed all their master recordings. And thereby hangs a tale.
If you are looking for a more conceptual thrift, try the Gauss Field Looper, an app that records audio on your smartphone and then loops it just like a classic tape machine.
I’ve been recommending Perfect Days for the last year. It’s a film about a man who lives a simple and thrifty existence in Japan. The story is packed with cassette tape nostalgia to inspire your next thrift store visit.