Are Thrift Shop Resellers Getting Rich? [View all]

[MineralMan]

There's a thread today that claims that people who buy and resell stuff from thrift stores are all rich yuppies who are "gentrifying" the thrift store business. Nope. They're not. Like everything else, Reddit is a good place to check to see if side-hustles of all types are reliably profitable.

Here's what Reddit users say about thrifting clothing to sell on Poshmark:

Browsing Reddit, most users report making anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per month. Most Reddit users specified they’re working their boutique or closet very part-time.

http://tightfistfinance.com/make-money-on-poshmark/#:~:text=Poshmark%20is%20actually%20a%20really,or%20closet%20very%20part%2Dtime.

I spent a couple of years buying and selling used and vintage items of all kinds. I shopped thrift stores, estate sales, yard sales, etc. for the goods I sold. I have some remarkable stories I can tell about fantastic profits for specific items. For example, a 75 cent pocket knife found in a box at an estate sale brought me $227 on eBay. Cool, huh?

But, here's the reality of doing this. Over those two years, I calculated my hourly net earnings. How much did I make per hour? About $7.50. Net. See, the thing is that you have to go and find the items to sell, and there is heavy competition for such stuff everywhere. Every morning you can see the resellers in Goodwill and other thrift stores, frantically searching for profitable stuff. Mostly, they find very little, but spend an hour or so looking in each store.

Or, they go to estate sales, where prices for most items are too high to be profitable to a reseller. Or, they spend hours going from yard sale to garage sale, usually finding nothing at most of them. Instead, you have to look for unusual items that go unnoticed by most resellers, and focus on those if you hope to make a profit. That's a tricky thing to do, really.

But, finding the stuff is just part of the problem. Then, you have to process it for sale. If you sell online, you have to take very good photos of items and skillfully write descriptions that will bring you top dollar. Remember, there are many people selling similar stuff on eBay or wherever, whatever the items are. You have to compete.

For the truly high-profit items, you have to research the item. For example, I took a chance on that early 20th Century Barlow Knife when I bought it for 75 cents. I spend a couple of hours researching the item to see whether it could be a real money maker for me and to help me write a description that would attract bids from knife collectors. It was, and did score an outstanding profit. However, many of the items I resold returned a far lower profit margin.

Then there is fulfillment. Once the thing sells, you have to package and ship it. More time spent, and your customer feedback depends on how well you do that. If there is not a lot of profit in an item, your earnings per hour go down very quickly. Then, there's time spent tracking sales, checking tracking numbers, dealing with customer issues, keeping accounts, and acquiring boxes, etc. to ship things in. (Hint: reusing old Amazon boxes does not get you good feedback on eBay.)

Then, there are mistakes in purchasing items that turn out not to be profitable. Lots of them. You might get your money back, but you won't earn much that way. In the end, it's a lousy way to make a living.

Bottom line: I stopped doing that as a side-hustle. I would have made more money working in the local liquor store for $12/hr. So, I found something else to do and stopped reselling.