Jennifer Le Zotte. From Goodwill to Grunge

Jennifer Le Zotte’s provocative and engaging book examines how the once marginal and morally suspect enterprise of selling used goods in the United States grew over the course of the twentieth century into a set of profitable multimillion-dollar businesses that attracted customers from across the class spectrum. These secondhand shoppers included the needy, who relied on secondhand goods to make ends meet; the better-off, who scoured thrift stores, flea markets, and garage stores to fashion subcultural identities; and the frugal, environmentally conscious buyers who actively resisted consumer culture’s siren call to buy the new and improved. A refreshing and essential addition to studies of consumer culture and the new history of capitalism, From Goodwill to Grunge presents a richly textured cultural and economic analysis of secondhand commerce and its changing relationship to the firsthand economy. Le Zotte begins her story in the mid-nineteenth century, when operators of junk shops, pushcarts, and pawnshops—businesses dominated by Jewish immigrants—sold used goods mostly to the poor. Middle-class consumers, suspicious of Jewish dealers and fearful that wearing preowned clothes would endanger their health and reputation, shunned used clothes and steered clear of the vice-ridden neighborhoods where secondhand commerce often transpired. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestant-run salvage businesses such as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries took steps to destigmatize and sanitize secondhand commerce. They thoroughly laundered clothes before selling them, emulated the orderly displays of department stores, and provided employment to the immigrant poor and physically disabled, who repaired the preowned clothes. In so doing, Goodwill and the Salvation Army positioned themselves as philanthropic capitalists who profited from recycling used goods while promising to aid the needy and to Americanize and Christianize their foreign-born employees. Some wealthy Salvationists periodically donned ragged clothing to demonstrate their solidarity with the poor and their disaffection from capitalism’s encouragement of self-indulgence and progressive obsolescence.

Advertising · Business · Capitalism · Clothing · Commerce · Confiscation · Consumer protection · Goodwill · Liberian dollar · Political science · Politics · American History and Culture · Finance · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies