Seven Reasons to Shop at a Thrift Store

This is my list of reasons to shop at a thrift store. I have always been intrigued by thrift stores even as a child, but didn't really start to shop there until I fell on hard times looking for furniture. Everyone should go into a thrift store at least once in their lives and see how the other half lives. You will be better off for it.

It is better to reuse something than it is to throw it away.

Seriously throwing away stuff is not good for the environment at all. Some stuff is still around a hundred years later that sits in a landfill. It is better to allow someone else to use it, than it is to rely on your municipality to deal with it once it has been picked up by the garbage man. Communities handle recycling differently, some recycle everything whether it is already separated or not, others want you to separate it for them. Clothing is toxic if it has polyester, rayon or nylon.

You are supporting the mentally impaired, children in need and other groups that are supported by charities.

Charities run thrift stores, some give jobs to the mentally impaired while others donate clothing to children. In my own neck of the woods the same company that runs some of the thrift stores also runs a children's hospital.

You are helping those in need that cannot truly afford to buy clothing at retail.

In Eastern Europe people buy their designer clothing at thrift stores because it is more expensive to do so there than it is here in the States. One day at work a friend told me that she would just go to the thrift store and get a bag of clothing as it was cheaper than buying an outfit retail. It is great that they have thrift stores to help out and I'm blessed that I have not been in that position myself. However you never know when your house is burnt down or a burglar walks off with everything. That thrift store is there for you if you only have $100 and need a bunch of clothes fast.

You never know what you are going to find.

I found a $295 pair of pants at the thrift store for $5. They were in plain sight up at the register. Why no one else wanted them I wasn't sure, but I still wear those pants at least once a week. I only paid $5 so I saw no harm in throwing them in the washer, and they still held up and didn't fade or anything. Between that and the tailoring to actually finish the hem in the pants I paid like $10. That is a 97% savings! My first experience with a thrift store though I saw a pair of trousers they were selling for $100. Part of me felt as though I had redeemed myself with that purchase of what I obviously could not afford as a kid in high school years earlier.

Used computers are far cheaper at the thrift store than they are elsewhere.

The first computer I bought in Hampton Roads was at a thrift store for $100 which included the monitor. It came with Mandrivia Linux, which I wiped clean and reinstalled Ubuntu Linux on it. The machine is a 1.6 Ghz machine with a small hard drive and somewhere between 512 GB or 1 GB of memory, I can't remember. It still runs faster than my Vista machine I paid $299 for at WalMart with a one gigabyte of memory (dual core). The only reason I bought the Vista computer was so that everyone else could have something to use while I tinker with the Ubuntu machine. I just saw a machine at the Goodwill today that was a 2.7 GB running Windows XP with a 160 GB hard drive plus monitor for $124. It wasn't that fast though but seeing that it had Windows XP though I'd probably just leave it alone. They also had an old school Windows ME machine for $99 with a 13 inch flat screen liquid crystal display monitor with like a 30 GB hard drive and 700 of something, I'm not sure. That machine would make a good netbook for someone and you would have to reinstall it with Linux because nothing else would work on it and no Internet service provider will support Windows ME these days.

Children's clothing is typically in better shape than anything else at a thrift store.

You can often find children's clothing of exceptional quality at a thrift store because children grow quickly and styles change often. Some of it may still have the tags on it. Chances are your child won't know and won't care; once they become a teenager thought that is a different story ...

You can find old LPs, DVDs, and VHS at a thrift store.

Some thrift stores are great places for disc jockeys and producers to find old material to sample from. It is also a great place for old school audiophiles that insist upon vinyl. If you still have a VCR there are plenty of tapes at the thrift store. They also have DVDs but thrift stores like to charge three times as much as they do for video and seeing that no one likes to part with their DVD collection the selection is limited, but it is still there.

The thrift store may be a lesson in humility for some but they do offer some great deals. The $100 J Crew shirt that you can't afford is probably in a thrift store somewhere for $5. Those expensive sweaters you can't afford are there as well. What I probably would not recommend is shopping for coats at the thrift store, unless you truly do like vintage clothing, because that is what you are going to find. One of the thrift stores in town always has coats from the sixties and seventies, in styles that are really cool if you are like a small or a medium. Back then a 2x was like a large.

The thrift store also has great deals on stuff you would not mind having but just aren't interested in paying retail for, like furniture, toys or even window treatments. I refuse to pay $4,500 for a couch when I can get an old couch from 1982 that does me just fine. I'm not paying that much in rent for my house so why would I even consider doing that; there are plenty of ordinary couches for $299 but they don't really do anything for me. Eventually I will need to do something though because the furniture I am sitting on is an eyesore ...