(Photo Courtesy of Goodwill Industries International)
A July sale of three Goodwill thrift store locations in North Carolina and South Carolina to private equity firm Metrolina Capital made sense for several reasons, a Goodwill official said. Metrolina put around $13.3 million in the hands of the former owners, Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont. The money will further the nonprofit’s career training and family stability programs.
In return, Metrolina, which has been adding Goodwill properties to its portfolio for a while, leases the sites back to Goodwill while adding viable businesses to its portfolio.
“Viable” might be selling the retail thrift industry short. “It’s a good time to be in the thrift business,” said Kent A. Kramer president and CEO of Goodwill Legacy Group, Indianapolis, Indiana. “The economy has been fairly stable, so people are purchasing new things and replacing things and recycling things.” Since 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led people to clean out their closets, he estimates that every year has brought between a six and eight percent increase in foot traffic throughout the entire Goodwill retail network.
Thrift stores are largely reliant on donations (a few purchase items for resale), and dropoffs have been booming as well. “People are becoming more conscious of what is being thrown away and what can be donated,” Kramer said. “The desire to keep things out of landfill, be good stewards of the environment, and also support good causes – you can do all of that donating to nonprofit operations, so there’s more of that happening.”
Retail thrift’s resurgence has been so pronounced that it is playing an increased role in government economic analysis. Secondhand apparel has joined vehicle sales in Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculations. This product category’s importance is likely to continue to grow, as younger generations increasingly embrace thrift stores when creating a personal aesthetic.
“More millennials and members of Generation Z are including secondhand items among their apparel purchases, with 42 percent of each generation shopping secondhand clothes at some point in 2020,” Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Economist Sarah Van Giezen wrote this past May in the report Turning thrifty: incorporating secondhand apparel into the Consumer Price Index.
“In fact, over 20 percent of each generation was buying secondhand clothes each month in 2024,” Van Giezen wrote. “Upcycling (the repurposing of old or discarded items or materials) has also become a popular trend with Generation Z on social media.”
Thrift stores have increasingly embraced online sales channels, and the wealth of information in product descriptors contributed to the BLS’s comfort in adding secondhand clothes to the CPI. According to Van Giezen, detailed descriptors on secondhand clothes gave the BLS confidence that its price change calculations were based on comparing items of similar quality.
Kramer speculated there might be several reasons why a Goodwill would sell its properties, such as an opportunity to infuse cash into the organization, a desire to open stores in newly recognized viable areas or an opportunity to open a larger store, or sorting or distribution center. “There’s usually strategic growth behind when you see the sale of a Goodwill store,” he said.
A spokesperson for Goodwill Industries of the Southern Piedmont said via an email that the stores would continue to operate, but declined to offer further comment. Metrolina Capital did not respond to requests for comment.
For Goodwill overall, however, the focus is on expansion. Kramer’s territory includes Indiana, Illinois and Puerto Rico, and he has had conversations with representatives from many of the 150 Goodwill organizations across the United States. “Our foot is on the gas,” Kramer said, in terms of Goodwill’s retail expansion activity. “It is leasing spaces. It is buying existing spaces and retrofitting them for Goodwill. It is buying land that can be developed into Goodwill stores, as well as warehouses and those types of things to help support the system.”
Based on his conversations across the enterprise, he estimated that between 40 to 50 facilities across the country will be opening during the upcoming 12 months.
His own territory within the continental United States is fairly saturated with stores. The territory includes 94 stores, including four “outlet” stores that sell items by the pound after the items have not sold piecemeal in the other stores. Kramer’s next anticipated expansion would be another outlet, as there is enough overspill inventory from the traditional retail stores to support it.
That saturation was part of what made him raise his hand and take on the Puerto Rican expansion. Since March 2025, he has opened four stores and a warehouse in Puerto Rico, and has two more stores under construction.
“Puerto Rico is a retailer’s dream,” Kramer said. “Twenty-five percent of the GDP is retail, and there was no Goodwill presence there. So, we saw it as a great opportunity to not only do thrift, but also to bring the mission of Goodwill to Puerto Rico.”
Like Goodwill, The Salvation Army is seeing a marked uptick in thrift shopping. “The overall factor is thrifting is a cool thing these days,” said Lieutenant Colonel Mark Nelson, commander of the Salvation Army Western Territorial Adult Rehabilitation Center. “The younger generations see it as a flex. It’s added value to say they’re thrifting and being value conscious, helping the economy [and the] ecology of our planet. All those things are positives that make thrifting more mainstream and more cool.”
Nelson, too, has felt the pressure of maintaining the quality of what the stores display. Part of that shift has been in how the Western Territory collects goods.
“We no longer offer truck pickups to donors who call us,” Nelson said. “We found over a number of years that was a declining yield for us, cost versus benefit, and we’ve pivoted more to making sure that our donation opportunities are in the best possible areas to capture the highest quality goods.” These include focusing on corporate donations of bulk items, and drives among homeowner associations or churches in higher-income areas. “That helps us to raise the yield and the value of the donations we’re getting,” Nelson said.
Beyond what is being offered, the Western Territory has been improving the retail experience within its stores. The standard thrift store shamble has given way to easy-to-maintain flooring, fixtures that are cleaned and organized to best showcase offerings, and universal planograms – instructions regarding where and how merchandise categories are displayed.
Under the planograms, each store provides a consistent shopping experience across all locations, presents best-selling or highest-margin offerings prominently and displays all merchandise in ways designed to maximize sales. These changes range from grouping apparel according to size rather than color, hanging items so their price tags are visible and consistently in the same space to “right-hand” layouts that provide subconscious prompts that foster a comfortable shopping experience.
The organization has also placed a premium on sales associate training, with a focus on providing the same level of customer care a shopper might find in a non-thrift retailer.
These changes are being implemented across all 91 of the Salvation Army’s Western Territory’s stores. That number will likely change: within the past decade there has been some contraction among underperforming stores, but as the thrift industry has boomed a double handful have come online, and there are currently “two or three” in progress, according to Nelson.
“Those are around the 10,000-square-foot range, where we used to go up to [20,000] and we find those to be more profitable,” he said.
The organization has also changed its location choice strategy. Nelson has leaned into the idea of picking locations based on the quality of donations, with the expectation that shoppers will make a store that consistently offers high-quality goods a destination. His expectation has been borne out in results, he said.
While a focus on merchandise offered has paid off for the Salvation Army, Angie Houloose, executive director of the National Association of Resale Thrift Shops (NARTS), in Polk City, Florida, offers a reminder that the reasons people shop at thrift stores can change between generations. Organizations that want to capture as many potential customers as possible need to understand the whys behind the buys.
As Nelson noted, younger people are increasingly embracing thrifting. But Houloose provides insight into their motivation, and increasingly it has less to do with being thrifty. For younger shoppers, thrift stores are becoming the first place they go to update their wardrobes.
Thrift store marketers have to acknowledge this change in attitude, especially as older generations of customers “cycle out.”
“Messaging has to change based off who their shopper is,” Houloose said. “You have a younger generation that wants to find something no one else is going to be wearing, and they want messaging that talks to that. But my mom, who is 95, is not looking for more stuff. She wants to support the mission of the store. And then, you have treasure hunters who love to go in and see what they are going to find and what they can make out of it.”
Each of these customer types, however, should be reminded of the mission behind the store, which is likely to resonate especially as their customers become more world-savvy. Nonprofit thrift stores that fail to build attachment through empathy with their mission might find they lose younger shoppers as they age up and their reasons for shopping change.
“When they flip that switch and tell their story in a way that the younger generations, middle generations and older generations understand why it’s important now and going to be important 10, 15 years from now when they’re in a different part of their, the stores are going to get them hooked and keep them for their lifetimes,” Houloose said.
The thrifting boom has not been distributed equally, however. At ReStore, Habitat for Humanity International’s home construction and improvement supply thrifts, donations are more at the mercy of a single factor – housing starts and improvement trends – than most other nonprofit thrifts. Beginning in 2021, the number of annual housing starts has dropped steadily, from 1.6 million in 2021 to just less than 1.36 million in 2025, according to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development data.
Habitat’s ReStore donated stock has traditionally been made up of, in descending order of quantity and revenue, furniture, cabinets, flooring, home goods, appliances and building materials. The slowing of housing starts and refurbishing has left its mark on the retail operations, with donations to ReStores slowing.
“We’ve seen a bit of a decline in our gross revenue,” said Carmen D. Smith, vice president of U.S. affiliate services at Habitat for Humanity International. “More substantially, we’ve seen a decline in some of our profit margins.”
Increases in prices have also had an impact on donations. In years past, corporate donors and other significant partners would have considered ReStore their primary means for disposing of excess material. “Now it’s option two,” Smith said, adding that within the past 12 to 24 months, large donors are turning to liquidation sales as a way of recouping costs.
“I don’t think we anticipate it getting better within the next six month,” Smith added. “The focus for us is on how can we be resilient to what we’re seeing, and then how can we also remain relevant.”
Some stores are increasing their focus on non-building materials, such as clothing or household goods, but these have traditionally made up a small percentage of the stores’ revenue, and Habitat leadership is wary of diluting its unique sales proposition by relying too heavily on these product categories.
A large percentage of ReStore customers traditionally have been either contractors or do-it-yourself enthusiasts. ReStore has recently had some success pitching its offerings to customers who take pride in providing housing solutions and adequate shelter within their communities, according to Smith.
To keep customers coming in, ReStores have to provide materials customers need. In some cases that means purchasing some of the easiest-to-move supplies, such as flooring or paint, although purchased product currently amounts to less than 15% of the organization’s total gross revenue.
The organization’s retail footprint has felt a pinch as well. Between 40 and 45 ReStore locations have closed during the past year, although Smith is quick to point out that eight have opened.
Given the nature of ReStore’s product mix, locations are not as easy to come by as they are for other retail thrift operations. The bulky nature of both purchases and dropoffs means space for drive-through access is prioritized.
Smith’s comment about previous donors turning to liquidation sales as opposed to making donations echoed a concern Goodwill’s Kramer expressed. “There are for-profit [retail thrift] entities out there. Some are mom and pop. Some are backed by venture capital. There are a lot of others on this growth wave for thrift.”
The competition from the commercial retail space, Kramer added, dilutes the impact of nonprofits’ abilities to invest in the communities they serve. “There’s lots of these [donation] bins. You might see them at grocery stores, and that type of thing, that just says clothing on it or something. Many times, those are for-profit people that never mention that they just sell the goods in there to make a profit.”
