Dealing With Our Stuff
A Review of
Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale
Adam Minter
Hardback: Bloomsbury, 2019
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Reviewed by Catherine Guiles
I recently went to a major department store to buy a new sweater. This store happened to sell secondhand clothes in a special section next to new clothes — and much to my surprise, I wound up buying a used sweater that I liked more than the new ones. It was actually more expensive than a new sweater, but likely of better quality – hence why it had lasted long enough to be resold.
When I bought my new-to-me sweater, I was participating in a massive yet little-understood part of the global economy that business writer Adam Minter skillfully examines in his book Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale. Minter goes around the country and the world to explore where and how stuff gets resold; who buys, fixes and sells it; and why. In doing so, he challenges us to examine our attitudes toward our possessions and purchases, our views of people who are different from us, and the impact of all our stuff on the environment. And he does it all in a way that’s engaging and fun to read.
Minter takes us from Goodwill Industries stores in Arizona that are frequented by Mexican visitors looking for items to sell back home, to electronics repairmen in Ghana who can fix imported TVs that are decades old, to Japanese used bookstores that send the tens of thousands of books they can’t sell to be recycled. Almost everywhere he goes, people look at secondhand goods as a way to support themselves and their families and an option that’s preferable to the cheap new goods, mostly from China, that are flooding their countries. (It’s also an industry that flourishes despite multiple governments’ attempts to ban or restrict it.) However, they tend to see the secondhand business as precarious, as the quality of new items declines and makes them harder to resell. They also wonder just what to do with the excess amounts of stuff that isn’t resold. (The answer is usually to throw it away or burn it up.) With his vivid, often entertaining descriptions of people and their businesses, Minter helps put a face on an often misunderstood industry.
One thing I appreciated about this book is Minter’s brief exploration of the role that religion and spirituality play in the world of secondhand goods. In Japan, after Buddhist monks say prayers for the deceased at temples, they help clean out their homes, motivated by the belief, also common in Shinto, that “spirits come to inhabit objects that have been used for years,” Minter writes. Meanwhile, Goodwill was started by a Methodist pastor in Boston to gather and fix unwanted clothes, and churches and other religious organizations in the US and UK have long run thrift shops and held used-good sales, both to raise funds and to help the poor. Apart from organized religion, dealing with our stuff – or our aging or deceased relatives’ stuff — forces us to think about mortality, identity and legacy. Minter’s descriptions of the aforementioned cleanout services in Japan, as well as the US, are sobering, as people often want their or their loved ones’ possessions to continue to be useful – and used by people like them. However, the desire to “take your unwanted used item to this innovative, sustainable solution at no cost to yourself, and it will be reused indefinitely” is impossible to fulfill, and instead, people “must, at some point, accept the idea that every object dies,” just as they do.
Minter also rebuts some commonly held beliefs about developed countries sending used goods to developing ones. Westerners often blame secondhand clothing for undermining the textile industry in African countries, but Minter points out that other factors may have played a role, namely a decline in cotton output since the mid-1970s and Asian competitors entering the market. He goes on to demolish the oft-reported stereotype of the Agbogbloshie slum in Accra, Ghana, as being nothing more than a burning dump for electronic waste, pointing out the entrepreneurial importers who bring used electronics into the country to meet ever-growing demand and the repair shops that keep goods from the junkyard functioning way longer than people would expect, creating “a perfectly circular economy where things are used and then reused … in ways that rich countries simply never achieve.” The bottom line is that Westerners can’t be so hung up on where their used possessions end up: “[I]f the affluent people who own that longer-lasting stuff hesitate to sell it to particular classes of people … then there’s really no point in creating longer-lasting, repairable products. Manufacturers might as well just make products that work only for their original owners and then spontaneously combust.”
Going forward, Minter has some suggestions for how to improve and sustain the secondhand industry. He recommends not putting too much hope in recycling, which struggles to be economically viable for clothing and textiles, but instead making – and buying – items that are built to last and can be repaired and resold over and over. He also supports right-to-repair laws that would make it much easier and less expensive for owners to get their electronics fixed, by going to independent repair shops rather than relying on costly repairs by manufacturers. And, he has a whole section on child car seats that reveals how commonly held ideas about safety may actually be hindering it – at least for children who could benefit from secondhand seats that are still usable.
Soon after I finished reading this book, I stopped by a local Goodwill store and wound up buying two nice shirts. But despite this and my sweater purchase, I’m far from perfect when it comes to using goods that will last. I’m writing this review while seated at an inexpensive particleboard desk that will probably end up in a landfill, and my closet and dresser are full of cheap clothes that I’ll eventually get rid of when they start to fall apart. However, Secondhand has encouraged me to think more wisely about what I buy, for the sake of the planet and the sake of my neighbors at home and elsewhere, and to not get too attached to it. Those are lessons we can all take to heart.
ADVERTISEMTENT:
Catherine Guiles
Catherine Guiles is an editor and writer based in Arlington, Viginia. Find her online at: CatherineGuiles.com
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