Any discussion of a place to buy secondhand goods will invite a range of opinions on whether it’s worth it.

Is it nice, if you don’t mind going all that way? Does it suck, and did it always? Are proceeds channelled to shadowy organizations? Do you keep finding amazing things there and nobody seems to talk about it?

Here I mostly leave aside the question of finds to talk about the other qualities a good thrift store has.

Information asymmetry

You should feel like you have an edge over the people intaking, sorting, and pricing items. This has nothing to do with cultivating a sense of superiority, it’s just a necessary precondition for pleasant surprises.

A classic case of this would be the Stelton vacuum jug mixed in with, and priced comparably to, a bunch of plastic lemonade pitchers. (I saw this at both the gone-but-not-forgotten canal/ring-road store in Eindhoven as well as at het Goed there.)

This may be a genuine lack of information on the part of staff or volunteers for any number of reasons, or it may be a kind of discretionary courtesy on their part — to not worry too much about it.

Between you and the store, the discerning hunter-collector should be the party that’s more online. There’s no going back once someone realizes they could be pricing “vintage Ikea” pieces according to instagram reels hype.

Music

A certain change in the instore background music is a leading indicator of price increases.

Ideally, you should just be hearing a local radio station complete with ad breaks. Classic rock and R&B playlists are fine, better still is an hour-and-a-half-long youtube video of Bob Marley’s greatest hits with an AI-enhanced portrait of the artist like I saw the other day.

Anything beyond this is cause for concern.

Profit motive

Keeping prices down is mostly only possible when the store is an appendage of a nonprofit with social or environmental goals directly linked to collecting goods and recirculating them. Obviously it’s also preferable if they have other funding streams so they’re not under too much pressure to generate sales revenue.

Side hustles

Sometimes in these nonprofit settings there will be associated initiatives that offer fruit or baked goods right there in the store, easing the pain of not finding anything. Emmaus Brussels offers apples and apple juices, Emmaus Eindhoven has a little café corner with (imitation-English?) Czechoslovakian porcelain which is also where acoustic instruments are sold.

Generations

It’s great when a secondhand store is staffed by retirees. This is more often the case in volunteer settings. Most noticeable is the pricing, which can come straight out of an earlier period on the inflationary timeline. People of older generations will have different notions of rarity than a younger person, in fascinating ways.

In special cases where individuals are allowed personal investment in operation of aspects of the store they can take their time to nicely clean, label and sort things (upstairs nostalgie room, Stichting Wereldhuis, Eindhoven). In these situations they have maximum context to tell you about what you’re looking at. Even better when longtime customers offer unsolicited takes on a purchase you’re considering.

Procedures

Interactions between shoppers are one thing, but we can’t be allowed to interfere with operations. One time I was wondering about the rest of a cutlery set that was probably still in the back room — I had painstakingly gathered everything but the knives and the incompleteness was driving me crazy. I asked several members of staff whether they could confirm or deny this — I wouldn’t dream of asking to have a look.

Even a simple request for information was treated with bafflement, and I think this is fundamentally appropriate. Just as the fisherman is ultimately at the mercy of the sea, I simply kept going back every day for a week like a complete degenerate and eventually the knives found their way out.

Zones

Different “departments” of the store can have quite different feels, which should reflect both the personalities of the individuals responsible for them as well as the architecture of the space. A classic model is a big, high-ceilinged central space holding large furniture and appliances with specialized rooms off to the sides. Emmaus Eindhoven is a cool, seemingly purpose-built variation on this where the central area is covered, but actually open-air.

These furniture spaces are best left unstaged, so you kind of have to squeeze between weird couches to look at a certain chair they encircle, forming a semi-accessible limbo dimension.

The smaller-scale the category of object, the tighter the space should be, focusing the attention. It can also be fun when certain sections are only open on certain days.

There will often be one cursed, depressing, often windowless zone (who could forget the living room suite section of the defunct Slera, Eindhoven) but we have to respect such areas for the role they play in intensifying the psychogeography.

Uncanniness

It’s a place full of old things and should feel accordingly removed from real life and maybe even the present day entirely. The space should be sufficiently convoluted that you don’t know exactly where you are in relation to the building’s exterior. You shouldn’t know how much time you’re spending in there, and certainly shouldn’t feel like anything’s rushing you along. The staff should show no sign of recognizing you or, god forbid, care what you’re buying.

Context

You should, however, be able to discern a relationship between the store’s merchandise and the surrounding community. The CD section maybe demonstrates the degree of proximity most clearly. The Queen East Value Village in Toronto was fairly indie rock-heavy. Some small-town stores will have a country section occupying the shelf space of all other genres combined.

Eindhoven is a very special place for electronics thrifting because of the city’s past as a Philips development and manufacturing centre. Finding a heater or lightbulb that was manufactured, used, and discarded entirely locally has a distinct feel. And the city still has many of the people who remember the conditions in which these objects emerged. Friend of the blog Ward once said that any given Eindhoven thrift store is probably a better Philips museum than the Philips Museum itself.

If there is a distinctive Brussels character to secondhand items, it might be in those things relating to NATO and the EU. I have some sick European Parliament tablecloths, but passed over a malevolent epoxy trophy awarded by Newt Gingrich and George J. Mitchell.

Cross-pollination

A store’s merchandise is particularly interesting when they’re taking in goods at a confluence of two or more cultures. Any large city where people are often living and working for a limited time before moving away are conducive to this, Berlin is also notable for a mix of West and East German stuff.

Recurring characters

Certain things pop up repeatedly. A lot of people must have bought Braun juicers back in the day considering how many are still around. Their good condition often suggests a gift or aspirational purchase, mostly left on the shelf. The company’s citrus juicers tend to have seen more use, maybe reflecting how much more simple they are to use and to clean.

The Charlotte Perriand-attributed Philips heat lamp is a classic Eindhoven example, also seen around the Benelux region to a lesser extent. Repeated appearances give you a sense of how a given product tends to hold up over time, and lets you become familiar with small design variations.

Of course there are more universal, low-context examples that just show up all over the place through sheer volume: Sony cube alarm clocks, Rupi Kaur books, and Ikea children’s section translucent stacking boxes. The latter of these are a good low-stakes find, particularly the earlier variation of the design with steeper draft angles.

These things can serve as a kind of price index, cross-sectionally (between cities or regions) and longitudinally (in the same city or even store over the years). One thing I keep an eye on is the Ikea Frosta (Aalto-knockoff) stool.

Louise comments that the most interesting form of this happens when you find some objects somewhere, then find some more of the same (or related) in an entirely different place. Completing a collection in this way bridges places.

Orientation points

As undesirable as they must be for the people running the stores, there should always be a few pieces that have been there as long as you can remember, outlasting the churn. Too large or theoretically worth something to just get rid of. They provide a sense of calm and continuity, unproductive though they may be. Think of this as an urbanism issue.

Louise continues, pointing out the Not for Sale items, things that have come into the shop but found their function before they could be sold. This could be a shelf, a radio, anything sufficiently durable and useful. Related are incidentals like plastic bags that leave the store not as product, but as supporting material.

A Y.P., not an M.P.

As a city’s culture needs places that aren’t entirely cleaned up and optimized, a secondhand store must have things you can buy in order to bring complications, rather than tidy solutions, into your life.

As long as defects are clearly disclosed, I’m happy to be able to buy a scary-powerful old toaster with a frayed cable that I can easily replace. On the other hand, I spent way too much of a Saturday trying and failing to find a replacement for a missing pot from a particular Zojirushi rice cooker, basically no trace of which exists online. You also want parts and hardware, from bike components to metal brackets of unclear origin.

Rearrangements

Of course it’s interesting when entire sections get moved around too. The Petits Riens central store has been through plenty of changes since I’ve lived in Brussels, and a major reshuffling becomes a point of conversation in the “community”. Visit often enough and you can still picture earlier iterations and argue over which setup was best. I have to assume a student at the neighbouring École de recherche graphique has done a project mapping this. Again, secondhand store as city.

Friends

Finally, a good secondhand store should be a place you should occasionally run into people you know. But don’t take it personally if attention drifts away from the conversation to something across the room.