Feb. 17, 2025
The Joy of Thifting
“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is an old slogan and one you’re probably familiar with. It’s a go-to for any book or textbook that is trying to teach its readers how to lower their impact on the environment. For me there are few things that are a better fulfillment of this slogan than thrifting.
Thrifting is a way to reduce consumption of newly manufactured items and reuse things that others have no more use for in one fell swoop. Thrifting has become more popular recently as people become more aware of our effect on the environment, but I think it has also gained in popularity for the same reasons I fell in love with it when I was a child.
Thrifting is a treasure hunt. You can never guarantee what you will find at a location at any point in time. Nothing is perfectly organized in a thrift store, so you can walk past the same thing twice and only see it on the third go round. Thrifting is something that you can do with as many people as you’d like and know that you will all find something to interest you. And if you buy something to cut up or repurpose, you don’t have to worry much about ruining it because it probably wasn’t expensive to start with.
For me, thrifting is the perfect way to find jeans, so I don’t have to feel bad about wearing holes in them when I walk the dog — and also to find books. I love the library in my town, but I first discovered several of my favorite authors by finding one of their books in a thrift store. There have been plenty of times when I’ve walked out of a thrift store empty handed, yet the thrill of finding something that I really love always outweighs the times when I find nothing at all.
My favorite thrift stores where I live in Sheboygan are Saint Vincent DePaul, Goodwill, and Inkling Books, which is a used bookstore and not technically a thrift store, but I love it, so I’m including it. If you live closer to Green Bay, Manna for Life and the Unity Resale Shoppe (pictured above) are both highly rated on Yelp — I’ve never been, so if you go, feel free to send me a review!