Savers' ($SVV) business model, while legally legitimate, is pretty hard to stomach at a…read morecustomer-facing level. They purchase items in bulk from non-profits up front and pay them a lump sum. Your purchase does not go to charity whatsoever. In fact, following regulatory scrutiny over charitable messaging in the late 2010s, they actually removed any signage suggesting affiliation with the Epilepsy Foundation from stores...Tax avoidance aside, the inventory from an average person like the writer and reader of this review, is completely free.
They just pay someone to: sort it, take a very cursory glance at eBay sales history (maybe even just listing price, which are two totally different things), print a price tag that's somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 that sale value, and throw it on a shelf. Fine. This is nothing new really. But, it has gotten pretty egregious over the years and it's hard to not be a little incensed knowing that this inventory is, by and large, gratis.
This particular store is jam-packed with people. I had to park in a lot I didn't even know existed, behind the store, at 2PM on a Thursday. The din of hangers screeching against the racks, people walking around talking on their phones as if they were shorting stocks on used Bop-Its at a Bloomberg terminal, and people sitting at the back of the store eating apple slices out of baggies (this was a new one). It's an interesting, if not somewhat sad, vignette of the economic reality for many people right now.
Seeing a beat up Nintendo Wii listed for $49.99 in the display case at the front is laughable. For a while now my favorite thing has been to just go to the front to smirk at what they deem high-value enough to put behind the glass.
If you're someone who knows beyond the surface level brands, or whatever, you might have had some good luck in the past maybe snagging a Barbour shirt for a couple of bucks. Back then, only the household names would be marked up. Now, I'm pretty sure they look up almost anything. It's become pretty hard to find a good deal. Not to sound greedy, but that's kind of the whole conceit of thrifting, right?
If it isn't the profiteering on their end making it difficult to find good deals, it's the torrent of people coming in with flipping in mind. I get it. Flipping is fun. But, half of that stuff you have in your cart is not going to sell. Honestly 80% of it won't and you'll end up hanging onto it out of stubbornness or just eventually returning it from whence it came. Board games are not worth selling, the weight and dimensions alone make the margins maybe a couple of dollars after paying for shipping and handling. Just because that celebrity cookbook sold once for $29.99 in June 2022 doesn't mean it will sell now. Despite that, likely because of TikTok, I see people combing the racks and loading up carts full of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes and old Bing Crosby Christmas records...
Not an indictment of flippers, it's more of an indicator of the economy we're in. Where so many people are now willing to squat in the crowded aisles, scanning every book on the shelf hoping to find some obscure first printing of an electrical engineering textbook to list on ThriftBooks. Clearly if people are willing to do that all day, they must need the money, and there's no judgement on that. It's just a shame because it does really thin out the amount of interesting things on the shelves for people wanting to find something purely for their own enjoyment.
I've been thrifting for a long time and I still love it, but this particular store always follows me home. I never leave feeling better than when I entered.
