There’s Something Unusual Happening in Thrift Stores These Days

January 25, 2026

“I have over 30 things in my cart,” says an eager fashion influencer to the camera.You’ve probably heard of “hauls” in the context of purchasing many—even dozens—of inexpensive items at a time from Shein or Amazon, which now encourages the behavior with a special section full of flash deals on dirt-cheap tees and accessories. But hauls are also a thing in the world of secondhand clothing. And this influencer, with a sharp blond bob and glass skin, is trying on jackets at a small-town Goodwill, where the merchandise has not yet been eviscerated by other consumers completing their own “hauls.” A dark brown jacket she tries on is “absolutely perfect” at $7. A light brown jacket with special cuffs “might be my favorite jacket I’ve ever found,” she says. But that jacket gets mere seconds of airtime before it is on to the next jacket, blue, featuring whimsical stitchings of houses, a garment she describes as reminiscent of something you’d find at Anthropologie.

I cannot tell you how many of these videos I have seen, as someone who has reported extensively on the fashion industry, and who likes to look around online for inspiration for my own outfits. Every week, I scroll through dozens of videos of influencers piling their carts high with secondhand clothes surely destined for closets stuffed to the gills. Many such influencers and the people who follow them align themselves with the idea of sustainable fashion. Which seems as if it should make sense: Isn’t it good to minimize the environmental harm of the fashion industry, which has been identified by the World Economic Forum as Earth’s third-largest polluter? The reality is, zealous secondhand shoppers may be contributing to the problem.

A recent study from Yale University published in Nature challenges the belief that buying secondhand fashion is inherently sustainable. Instead, the study reveals that the secondhand industry could be poised to become fast fashion 2.0. This is partly because people are buying secondhand clothes the same way they do fast fashion: throwing out garments quickly and rapidly buying new ones.Researchers surveyed 18-to-79-year-olds based in the U.S. on various aspects of their fashion consumption, such as frequency of purchases and attitudes toward secondhand clothing. They found that thrifting can quickly turn into overconsumption through what they attribute to the rebound effect. It’s a behavioral pattern in which consumers allow themselves to buy secondhand clothing in excess because their purchases are relatively cheap and “green.”

“It’s guilt free,” says Meital Peleg Mizrachi, a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s department of economics and lead author of the study. “Instead of buying one black dress, I can buy five dresses,” she says, articulating what an eco-conscious shopper might think. Why not go a little wild if it’s clothing that has been recycled? Secondhand hauls can still be bad for the planet, says Peleg Mizrachi: “Once we’re buying a lot in a high volume, there’s an environmental price to that.” Her study finds that people who buy primarily secondhand clothing tend to get rid of their clothes faster than “regular consumers” (people who buy items new). So someone who ransacks a Goodwill to fill their closet to the brim is more likely to use their wardrobes less and get rid of their clothes in larger amounts, ultimately creating more textile waste.

The study also demonstrates that purchasing used clothing doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of fast fashion a given person buys. It’s a concept the study refers to as moral licensing, when doing something good leads to doing something less good. That is: Maybe you go out and buy five new-to-you dresses at a thrift store … then, feeling that you’ve done your duty as a responsible person, you pop into H&M and pick up more the next day.

Further, you can’t simply cancel out the harms of consumption by putting all those clothes you purchased in hauls—at secondhand stores or otherwise—in your local donation bin when you’re done with them. In the best-case scenario, doing that does allow other people to finish out the lifespan of the garments at relatively low cost. But that’s not always what happens. “Few know that many of their donated clothing [items] are exported for a profit,” says Sheng Lu, an expert in the global textile and apparel industry at the University of Delaware. Discarded secondhand clothing from Europe, North America, and East Asia are sold to companies in places like northern India, says Lu. There, they’re shredded by thousands of workers in order to be turned into low-grade yarn used for things like rugs and sheets—exposing those workers to serious health risks.

A recent report by the Guardian, for instance, found that workers in northern India’s Panipat recycling factories are getting sick due to their exposure to microfibers found in materials like nylon (think low-rise track pants or a ’90s-style windbreaker). A 2023 study found that long-term exposure to microfibers poses serious risks to lung tissue. As a result, doctors in Panipat say, factory workers as young as 30 are suffering from chronic lung disease. Ghana, Kenya, and Pakistan are also dealing with the West’s unwanted clothing, as developing countries import large volumes of low-value textiles. At the core of this problem is the declining quality of our clothing, not secondhand fashion itself. But buying up and discarding tons of secondhand clothing doesn’t help.

In addition to the health effect on textile recycling workers, a large portion of discarded clothing can’t even be recycled at all. These clothes are made with blends of cotton and polyester that are hard to break down, and thus end up in legal—or sometimes illegal—landfills with their own environmental hazards.Kimberly Guthrie, chair of the fashion design and merchandising department at Virginia Commonwealth University, says she and her students have noticed a substantial decline in quality of clothing at thrift stores. “It’s not like it used to be,” she explains.

Peleg Mizrachi’s study touches on the disconnect between the intention to shop sustainably and overconsumption behaviors, especially in students. The study finds that while students exhibited higher levels of knowledge than other age groups about the environmental impact of the fashion industry, they scored the lowest on sustainability considerations when making purchasing decisions. Instead, they were concerned primarily with the price.Guthrie says she sees this disconnect in the students she teaches in fashion school. “Do they really know what degradation looks like? Have they smelled what a landfill smells like? There’s such a detachment between intent and actuality,” she says. It’s a finding that surprised Peleg Mizrachi. “The fact that they’re knowledgeable but, still, their primary consideration in purchasing is only low prices was very, very depressing.”Even if your goal is to spend as little money on clothes as possible—a real scenario for students with limited funds—giving significant weight to other factors like durability can help you conserve resources and money over time.

Peleg Mizrachi encourages shoppers to ask themselves a series of questions before they make a purchase, whether new or thrifted: Am I going to wear this item more than 30 times? Will I still wear this five to 10 years from now? Do I have something similar in my closet? Does purchasing this item require buying a complementary item to go with it? Am I just buying this because it’s a good deal? “It’s all about mindful consumption,” she says. That could mean buying fewer “trendy” items that risk going out of style in a season or two. After all, some things never go out of style—like the perfect trench coat or a crisp white T-shirt.

If we want secondhand fashion to be truly environmentally friendly, we need to break out of our old patterns of overconsumption and accept that we can’t thrift our way out of our current global waste crisis. Otherwise, thrifting risks becoming another hashtag, buzzword, and greenwashing tactic used to sell us more clothing that we ultimately don’t need.