NYC-Feature Story

Secondhand, First-rate
Scoring thrift store threads

By Anita Ames

It wasn’t just a regular “I Love New York” T-shirt. The letters were made out of all different colors of velvet and the words went straight across the shirt instead of one under the other. It was super exclusive. I had to ask my adult co-worker, Ernest, where he’d gotten it.

“Beacon’s Closet. A thrift store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn,” he said.

I could never see myself shopping at a thrift store, so I didn’t think much more about it. But the next day when I walked into my job at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, Ernest had on yet another great item—a blue jacket with a yellow hood and blue drawstrings, large pockets and a metal zipper. Once again, he said he’d bought it at Beacon’s Closet. He also told me you could trade and sell your clothes there. Now I wanted to know more. “What are the store hours? When can I go?” I asked.

High Standards

That weekend I went to the store and tried to sell all of my old clothes. But the store clerks discarded all of my items. They said my jeans were too worn-out, that cords didn’t sell well at the store, and that my shirts weren’t vintage enough. I was really upset because I thought thrift stores bought anything and everything. My impression of thrift stores was that they only sold worn-out clothes that no one wanted anymore. But the clerks said I could leave my clothes there to be donated to charity, so I did.

I decided to look around the store for clothes anyway. I went to the denim section and saw a whole bunch of expensive name-brand jeans, like True Religion, 7 For All Mankind, Chip and Pepper, Paper Denim and Cloth, and much more. When I looked at the price tags, I couldn’t believe my eyes. A pair I liked were only $21! The jeans looked fairly new and some even still had tags on them. Now it made sense that they hadn’t bought my worn-out jeans.

Stupid Not To

My friends were kind of skeptical about the store. “How do you know those jeans are real? They could be bootleg for all you know,” they said. Some even said, “Ew, someone else’s clothes? That’s so nasty.”

But I knew the jeans were real because they had the same tags that were in my jeans that I’d bought for $100 at Bloomingdale’s. The idea of wearing other people’s clothes did bother me at first, but I knew I could easily wash the clothes at home. I thought it would be stupid to give up the chance to buy jeans for less than half the price they would be in regular stores.

The next time I went to Beacon’s Closet to sell clothes, I took some of my best attire that I didn’t wear anymore. I brought in an Adidas track jacket that I’d paid $85 for, and a pair of Coach loafers that had cost me $130. The store bought both the jacket and shoes.

At first I felt cheated because I only got about $15 in cash. But then I bought a Michael Kors T-shirt for $8 (it must have cost more than $70 new) and some fierce vintage sunglasses for $3. So in the end I think it evened out, and I ended up with some great new (well, old) items.

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