Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

Danshari.” It’s a three-character Japanese word that means, in order of the characters,1 severing a relationship with unnecessary things (dan), purging clutter that overwhelms the home (sha), and achieving a sense of peace by separating the self from things (ri). Cleaning your home of clutter, the idea goes, also cleanses your heart and mind—regardless of where the stuff ends up.

Between 1967 and 2017, the money that Americans spent annually on stuff—from sofas to cell phones—increased almost twentyfold.

Nothing that an affluent American minimalist can say about consumerism and stuff is likely to change the mind of a developing-world teenager whose only experience of minimalism has been involuntary.

Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.

Eventually, many of those refurbished monitors were exported back to the United States as new devices, giving the rich man the opportunity to buy back his broken thing at a premium.

Consumers don’t want to pay more, but they will when they see the value

Target recycled those more than 500,000 seats over the years. They would’ve sold, and many children south of the border would be safer because their parents had access to a secondhand market.

The things that I value, I quickly realized, generally aren’t valuable to anyone but me. Once I had that understanding, I started letting go and curtailing what I was buying in the first place.

take your unwanted used item to this innovative, sustainable solution at no cost to yourself, and it will be reused indefinitely”—almost never exists.

Rather, they were likely made in South Asia, exported to the United States, and worn until they were donated to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or some other thrift-based exporter. When they didn’t sell there, they were exported again, to Kandla most likely (or perhaps Mississauga, en route to Kandla), cut up, and exported again—this time to Star Wipers in Newark, Ohio. Each step of that journey makes perfect economic sense, even if the totality of it sounds ridiculous.

mostly in the United States—that have added textiles to their curbside recycling programs have found that residents generally give their shirts away as easily as they give away their beer cans.

most consumers have no answer if someone asks, “Who will be last to use your hoodie?” The end of clothes has become nearly as mysterious as the end of life itself.

In my experience, nobody in the secondhand-clothing industry likes to talk about the end of clothes. But there is an end. The only question is when.

These looming, multicolored cubes are packed with items donated with the best of intentions. But the best of intentions, alone, can’t sell clothes, and more than half the apparel that arrives at Goodwill is unsold.

Almost 90 percent of the goods will go unsold.

Walmart and Ralph Lauren, alike, bet that price—more than quality—moves product.

But that’s not a problem when everybody’s making enough money to buy more in a few weeks.

(cybersexual addiction was number one).

As a realtor, you can tell people to declutter. But to do it yourself …” She shakes her head.

I sometimes get mad at people. They buy things for no other reason than it’s cheap.

I’ve been doing moves for thirty years,” he tells me as he stands up. “And I’d never buy something from Ikea. We’ll shrink-wrap them, but it’s only fifty-fifty they make it.

The world does not need to make any more hangers.

Exercise equipment has no value,” she says, then clicks through to an image of bookshelves stacked with magazines, many with yellow spines.

In recent years, the industry’s annual profits are triple those of Hollywood.

I’d like to stroll, but I’m riding in