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Thrifting Was about Frugality. How Did It Become All about Profit?
“I’m the most hated man in town,” Ray McKelvie told me. The town in question was Clinton, British Columbia, approximately 350 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, on Highway 97. Later, I asked another Clinton resident whether McKelvie’s claim was true. She thought for a moment. “Well, there’s Joe, who lives in the trailer park,” she said. “We don’t like him much either. But it’s about even.”
McKelvie and I were sitting in the North Road Trading Post, the antique store McKelvie ran in a converted gas station at the north end of town. The garage and lot were dotted with rusty vehicles, some that had rolled off Detroit assembly lines over sixty-five years ago.
It was just one of many antique stores in Clinton—the collectibles trade had pretty much taken over the main street. It was 2013, and antiquing was big. Part of the popularity surge had come from television. First came the BBC and PBS versions of Antiques Roadshow. Then 2010 saw the debut of American Pickers, a History Channel reality show about two hunters of collectibles who scour the United States for hidden treasures. It was joined by a Canadian version in spring 2011. The production team of Canadian Pickers (it aired in other countries as Cash Cowboys) had recently brought their cameras to Clinton.
They got a friendly reception down the road at the Clinton Emporium. McKelvie’s place would seem to have been a natural too. Inside his garage was a standout: a cherry-red 1955 Hudson Metropolitan, a gorgeous piece of automotive history that would have looked great on TV. But it was not to be. “Ray told me, ‘If they set foot on this property I’ll shoot their asses,’” said local Lori Sparks.
Sparks was the owner of the White Elephant, another Clinton antique and curio shop across the street. She was on good terms with McKelvie but knew he could be a bit touchy. And, when the pickers came to town, he didn’t appreciate their attitude, publicity be damned. It is said around town that a rifle was produced to convince the TV crew to steer clear of the North Road Trading Post.
“My grandmother always said, ‘A good deal is one where the buyer and seller both end up happy,’” McKelvie told me from behind a glass case full of vintage miscellany. “They’re always bragging on that show about squeezing a low price out of somebody. I don’t like it. I told them they could keep their cameras on the sidewalk.”
Belligerent though he was, McKelvie had a point. The second-hand goods market had definitely undergone a shift. Even back then, what was once known as thrifting had instead become a combination scavenger hunt and stock market.
Clinton’s antique merchants were seeing collectible mania transform the economics of their profession. According to Al Starkenburg, a vendor who shared space in the Clinton Emporium, competition had depleted the once-happy hunting grounds of Prairie farms and small-town garages. “There are at least twelve shows on TV right now about junk,” he said. “Everybody thinks they can put something out, hang a $38 tag on it, and out it goes. Farmers used to say, ‘How much stuff do you need?’ Not anymore. Prices are way up.”
That was a dozen years ago. Since then, the trend in the second-hand market has been an ever-greater emphasis on the profit angle. It’s understandable. A savvy browser can hit the jackpot.
In the summer of 2024, collector Allen Treibitz went to a barn sale in the Hamptons, where he saw a painting hanging on the wall. He didn’t recognize the signature but could see it was not some amateur landscape daubed while watching Bob Ross on The Joy of Painting. Treibitz bought the canvas for fifty bucks. What he had found was a lost 1912 work by legendary BC painter Emily Carr. It sold at auction that fall for $290,000.
Marcus Pollard of Victoria, BC, is a long-time thrifter. He remembers the day he made his big score at a Value Village. “It was pouring rain,” he recalls. “I hadn’t dressed for pouring rain. Everything in the store smelled like urine. I was saying to my wife on the phone, ‘I’m sick of going through people’s piss-stained crap.’ Then I said, ‘Hold on a second . . .’ and pulled out this book.” It was, Pollard quickly recognized, a first edition of At Swim-Two-Birds, the 1939 novel by Flann O’Brien, still in its dust jacket, for $3.99. “There are maybe 240 copies in the world,” Pollard says.
The reason collectors know that fairly precise number is because, in 1940, the Luftwaffe bombed the London warehouse where unsold copies were kept, incinerating almost all of them. After the war, the book would gain critical acclaim and go through many reprints, raising the value of those rare first editions. “I ended up selling it to a fellow in England for $4,900 or something like that,” Pollard says.
That’s the dream. It’s what drives the popularity of various TV franchises. But is this profit seeking a perverse twist on the original ethos?
Once upon a time, the second-hand market was not a retail lottery. It represented simplicity, economy, recycling, even a proto anti-consumerism.
Thrifting, as the name implies, was about frugality.
Recycling was once a practical necessity for working-class people. More than that—it could be a profession. Nineteenth-century rag-and-bone men trolled the streets and alleys, sorting through piles of garbage for saleable trash. Bones became knife handles, animal hides became hats, old cloth was repurposed as “shoddy,” a mix of recycled and new fabric. The work of rag-and-bone men was the closest thing cities of that time had to systematic trash disposal. Modern trash receptacles appeared only in the late nineteenth century, with London mandating the use of the first dumpsters.
In 1884, Paris administrator Eugène Poubelle decreed that rubbish bins must be provided to apartment dwellers—not just one but several, to sort items for disposal or recycling. Paris bins became known as poubelles, a French name that has stuck. It wasn’t intended as a compliment. Trash bins, it was said, were a bureaucratic imposition that impinged upon the honest rag-and-bone trade. (That old system of garbage collection and repurposing survives, more or less, in Cairo, where a community known as Zabbaleen has been the primary means of garbage disposal for decades. So expert are the Zabbaleen—it is estimated they successfully recycle 80 percent of the trash they collect—that when the Egyptian government hired professional waste disposal companies in 2003, locals complained about the decline in efficiency.)
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the first charity thrift shops began to appear, run by the Salvation Army and others. Goodwill was founded in Boston in 1902. None of these shops were aimed at upscale browsers—no one was then sorting through thrift shop racks seeking hidden treasure. Charity shops served the multiple purposes of raising money for good works and soul saving, providing employment, and offering cheap second-hand goods to those with little to spare.
Long before the arrival of Antiques Roadshow, thrifting had already moved beyond thrift. It was hip, as yet another John Lennon–composed Beatles song proves. In January 1967, Lennon dropped into an antique shop in Sevenoaks, Kent, where he found a framed nineteenth-century circus poster that had once advertised an engagement by Pablo Fanque’s Circus Royal in the town of Rochdale. Quoting from the poster with only a few variations, Lennon created “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” which would become the final track on side one of the epic album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Lennon did change the name of the waltzing horse—the poster identified the wonder steed as Zanthus. Lennon changed it to Henry. Scanned better.)
By the 1970s, a hierarchy of sorts had developed in the US and Canada, with Salvation Army and Goodwill stores on the bottom, then collectible and vintage fashion shops, and antique stores at the high end. Thrift shops were as much about style as frugality. As a teenager, Pollard worked at one such place and even lived in the back for a time. Located on Victoria’s Johnson Street, it was called Bazaar. The owner was Jane Mundy. It was the early 1980s, and, she recalls, business was brisk.
“There was another place a couple of doors down called Metropole, one up the street called Bay Window,” says Mundy. “We were all competing for the same cashmere sweater.”
How fierce was the competition? Mundy once spent a night in jail over it. She used to prowl the donation dumpsters behind Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, looking to grab good stuff before those charity thrift stores opened. “In the dead of night, one of my employees and I would dive into the boxes with flashlights in our mouths and just go through everything before it got to the Sally Ann the next day,” Mundy recalls. “One night, we got busted. Denny, my employee, was in the Goodwill dumpster, and I was in another one. We must have been drunk, yelling at each other about what we found, and one of the neighbours heard us and called the cops. Cops took us down to the station. I was absolutely panicked, thinking they’d find out I had a store. So, I said I was a university student and we were on a scavenger hunt.”
Nonetheless, Mundy and her accomplice had to spend a night in the drunk tank. Regrettably, there was no time to acquire any jailhouse tattoos. “Thrift 4 Life,” maybe.
From McKelvie’s gun to Mundy’s prison record, thrifting could be a cutthroat business. Veterans of the trade had their tricks—Mundy had a particularly clever one. “I used to put ads in the paper, saying I was looking for collarless men’s shirts. I knew these little old ladies around [posh Victoria neighbourhood] Oak Bay would have a treasure trove of antiques and God knows what. So, I’d go over to their homes with my big car and trailer attached. They would bring out their dead husbands’ collarless shirts from the ’20s. Then I’d say, ‘Do you have anything else you want to sell?’ And everything would come out, paintings off the walls, the works.”
Nor did Mundy always abide by McKelvie’s maxim that everybody in the transaction should come away happy. “One big score, I was at a garage sale; this young couple were selling off their parents’ stuff. There was a commercial fishing net in the corner, with all these wooden duck decoys. And I started to vibrate. I said, ‘How much do you want for that junk over there?’ The guy said, ‘I don’t know, give me ten bucks.’ I said, ‘Will you take eight?’ just to be even more of a brat. Anyway, there were about eight decoys, all hand-carved, glass eyes. I sold one for about 300 or 400 bucks. They were worth maybe a couple of thousand altogether, maybe more.”
At times, Mundy found herself on the other side of the blade. “I don’t remember where I found it now, but I had this silver emblem: an eagle, hand-stitched with some kind of silver thread. It looked like something that would be on the saddle of a horse.” Mundy didn’t like selling things she didn’t know the value of, but a persistent customer badgered her into putting a price on it. “I said, ‘Just give me fifty bucks.’ About a week later, I was walking down antique row on Fort Street. I saw it in the window of Hibernia Antiques, all by itself, labelled ‘Rare Napoleonic piece.’ It was going for thousands of dollars.”
What role do thrift stores play in the retail world? Thrift shops, flea markets, and yard sales now occupy a curious crossroads at the intersection of divesting and acquiring. In TV terms, thrifting is where Tidying Up with Marie Kondo meets Hoarders.
A person bent on simplifying, getting rid of excess, and earning needed cash can do so via yard sales and thrift store donations. Customers, however, are generally headed steadily in the other direction. Thrift store clients may not be feeding the industrial machine chewing up resources to churn out emissions and superfluous goods. But neither are they simplifying. There’s a reason Berkeley’s Curiosity Shop uses the slogan “100,000 things you don’t need.”
The fault line can run through families. “I hate thrifting,” says Shelagh Levangie. “I hate going to those shops. And my husband loves to thrift. It’s a bit of a hoarding thing. He thinks, because it’s cheap, he can acquire more of it. If he had his way, we would be living in a den of shit. I come from that sense of ‘Less is more.’ You don’t want stuff because you have to manage stuff. But he loves to thrift. I don’t think he’s ever bought a new pair of shoes.”
For Pollard, thrifting clearly crosses a number of different lines. Is it about economizing? Absolutely—if you gaze upon his sweet Marantz stereo amplifier and Klipsch speakers, obtained for ten bucks apiece. Is it about collecting? Definitely—Pollard searches diligently for rare vinyl, books, and comics. But his thrifting cannot be contained in those narrow boxes. Almost inevitably, it becomes a matter of developing personal style, a means of connection, even a form of therapy.
Pollard and his wife, Trish, have a son, Nathaniel, who is autistic and has, in the past, been prone to violent outbursts. Once, when Nathaniel was placed in a locked and guarded room at Victoria General Hospital, the Pollards took thrifting breaks. “We would go through the books and records,” Pollard recalls, “and it was just a way to get our heads as clear as possible. We were 100 percent using thrifting as therapy. It was the only place we felt we could just go out for an hour while Nathaniel was, you know, in his locked room with three security guards outside.”
Thrifting runs in the family. “My mom died three weeks ago,” Pollard says. “Cleaning up her house, it was very clear that she was doing thrifting as therapy as well. She had a pretty small place, a small one-bedroom. And she had twenty champagne glasses. But they were lovely champagne glasses. So, she would find things that she thought were pretty. And actually, the last few times I was with her, that’s what we did. We would meet at Quadra Village; there are two thrift stores down there. That’s how we would spend our time together.
“There’s a photograph of my mom and me in Seattle, at a book sale, when I was four years old, so it’s something we had always done. We would see things and talk about them. You know, we’d see a Connie Francis record, and my mom would talk about Connie Francis, or she’d pick something up and say, ‘This is pretty,’ and I would say, ‘Yeah, that’s fucking ugly,’ and we would have a conversation through it. So, we had fifty-nine years of a relationship together. We didn’t have to talk about shit all the time. By picking up something old, or something that belonged to somebody else, we would find a connection, and we would triangulate that thing with us.
“Growing up in the ’80s, the things we liked just weren’t in the modern world at all,” Pollard says. “People were throwing away those things that we liked, whether it was records, or comic books, or blue jeans, or the ’50s era shirts, or anything like that. So, we all just gravitated toward the thrifts. And I’ve just maintained that.”
Pollard bemoans the shifts that have taken place in thrifting culture. For one thing, the keen eye that was once required to discover a treasure like At Swim-Two-Birds is now available on your phone. “I was just in Value Village a couple of days ago,” he says, “watching somebody go through the books. There’s a couple of Amazon apps where you just scan the UPC, and it will show you whether there are a bunch of copies on the marketplace or not and if you could sell it. They just go click, click, click. Well, that takes the fun out of it. When I was a kid, you needed knowledge to make these things happen. When it came to buying books, you would have to know the finer points, what made a first edition different than a second edition. Or, you know, the third page had a U where there was supposed to be a Q. I guess technology democratizes it, but it makes it less interesting. On the other hand, I go, geez, I should have figured out how to do that myself. I really should have made money off it.”
Online shopping has also transformed the hobby. “With the advent of eBay and Grailed and Poshmark, people are just buying and selling stuff all the time,” Pollard says. “So, when you go to the thrifts, there’s an air of desperation, people who are just looking for a score so they can turn it around and sell it, which I’m not. I’m very amenable to that—I love buying stuff and finding out that it’s worth a ton of money and selling it. I have no problem with that, but it has just kind of changed.”
Pollard and his wife like to take thrifting trips down the Oregon coast. “This year we hit a few thrifts, and it feels like all the good stuff is gone from the stores. The stores are gone too. Goodwill and Savers [the American branch of Value Village] have kind of taken over everything. You don’t see the local church thrift stores, the hospital auxiliaries anymore. And the Goodwills all have eBay sites, so they siphon off the good stuff and put it on eBay.”
“I go to Value Village occasionally,” Mundy says. “You can’t go in there and get a T-shirt for $1 or $2 anymore. It’s quite expensive. Now everybody’s got their own pickers. Value Village, for example—items get sorted first before it goes out to the public, so you don’t get the deals anymore.”
Thrifting as a means of frugality has upsides and downsides. From a purely financial point of view, thrifting can be a bit like shopping at Costco—a practice intended to save money that instead becomes a means of overspending. Yet as Pollard’s example shows, the value of thrifting cannot be reduced to a balance sheet. Marie Kondo’s favourite question—Does this spark joy?—is not limited to objects. It also applies to the search.
“I was talking to an old boyfriend recently, in Value Village,” Mundy says. “I said, ‘So, Godfrey, what are you getting today?’ He says, ‘Nothing.’ He’s not allowed. His wife told me he’s not allowed to get anything at all. Can’t bring home a thing.” But like a reformed drinker sipping a non-alcoholic beer, he still browses. “He’s still got that bug to go in, just to look around,” Mundy says. “Window shopping.”
Thrifting falls on a fault line between finance and leisure. Like playing professional poker, it can also be a modern career. One that can even get you on TV.
Not at McKelvie’s place, though. Taking your cameras his way could get you shot. But then, McKelvie knew those dangers well. He told me about one personal online shopping expedition that led him to big trouble. McKelvie had been browsing for a bride. He met a Lithuanian woman on the internet, brought her to Clinton and married her. “Fifty-nine days later,” McKelvie said, “she tried to kill me. Shot at me with a 30-30 when we were on a hunting trip.”
His wife insisted it was an accident. At any rate, there was no return policy.
Excerpted, with permission, from Cheapskate in Lotusland: The Philosophy and Practice of Living Well on a Small Budget by Steve Burgess, published by Douglas & McIntyre, 2026.
The post Thrifting Was about Frugality. How Did It Become All about Profit? first appeared on The Walrus.
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