Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

Between 1967 and 2017, the money that Americans spent annually on stuff—from sofas to cell phones—increased almost twentyfold. Some of that stuff will become treasured heirlooms worthy of future generations. Some will be buried in landfills, turned to ash by incinerators, or—in rare cases—recycled into new goods and heirlooms. And some will persist, packed in basements, closets, attics, garages, and storage units. The precise breakdown is unknown, but there are hints. For example, one 2006 study of Los Angeles middle-class homes found that 90 percent of garage space is now used to store stuff, not automobiles.1 Americans aren’t alone in their love of stuff. But they are unique in having so much space to store it. That’s a luxury other people would love to have. For example, the Japanese are just as shopping-mad as any CX-7-driving Tucsonan. But their homes are much smaller. So, to make room for new, many Japanese purge. There’s nothing particularly unique in their approach, but millions of Americans—keen to bring order to their homes—have embraced what Marie Kondo, the entrepreneurial Japanese organizing consultant with bestsellers and a hit television series, calls the KonMari Method. It’s an enticing system: keep only what sparks joy; toss everything else. It also leaves open an essential and pressing question: What happens to all that stuff after it’s been KonMari’d?

I published my first book, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. In it, I followed U.S. recyclables like cardboard, shredded automobiles, and Christmas lights around the world, primarily to China, and argued that “if what you toss into your recycling bin can be used in some way, the international scrap recycling business will manage to deliver it to the person or company who can do so most profitably.”

Fortunately, a lack of data doesn’t mean the trade in used goods is untraceable. But instead of finding it through data, a reporter must travel to the places where secondhand goods are collected, bought, repurposed, repaired, and sold. That might entail watching someone take a picture of a shirt and post it to Facebook, eBay, or Poshmark. Or it might entail following a Ghanaian buyer of old laptops from the United States to the city in northern Ghana where he sells them. Both are small acts that underline an often overlooked truth. Secondhand goods clothe, educate, and entertain billions of people around the world. And all this is accomplished using less energy and far fewer raw materials than what’s required for new goods. However, because governments tend to focus on the value of things made and sold new, the value of used things exchanged between people and businesses is generally invisible except to the people who are involved in buying, selling, and moving them.

Who buys used plastic antlers (who buys the new ones)? A tattered sofa? A pilled T-shirt? The flood is rising. Just twenty years ago China was a major importer of secondhand clothes; now it’s a major exporter, with a huge supply that’s driving down the price of used clothes—and the economics of the used-clothing business—globally. It’s not just China that’s shifting to new, either. Growing affluence across the developing world means that more and more consumers are opting for new stuff. Sustainably minded consumers in wealthy countries with the best of intentions simply aren’t numerous enough to make up for the global erosion in secondhand demand. That imbalance manifests itself in growing piles of unwanted stuff. According to a 2018 study by the World Bank, humans are on track to generate waste at a pace more than double that of population growth through the year 2050.2 Most of that growth will occur in developing regions of Asia and Africa striving to achieve American-style consumption-based economies.

Let’s not pretend: that growth will have negative consequences for the environment. But those consumption-based economies will also bring tangible benefits to billions of human beings, including better health and education. Nothing that an affluent American minimalist can say about consumerism and stuff is likely to change the mind of a developing-world teenager whose only experience of minimalism has been involuntary.

If this book succeeds, readers should come away with a much better understanding of how the afterlives of their purchases impact the global economy, the environment, and, ultimately, their closets and basements. With any luck, you’ll have a better idea of what happened (or didn’t happen) to those bags of clothes and that beat-up sofa Mike conveyed through the donation door. And just maybe you’ll change how and why you purchase stuff, if only to make sure you don’t leave a mess for others to clean up later. Like most Americans, I have done my own share of accumulating over the years. Researching this book helped me let go of some—but not all—of it. I can’t promise readers of this book that they’ll have a similar experience. But they will find a surprising world where what’s old becomes new again, over and over, and the desire to profit from castoffs creates innovation and livelihoods—all over the world at all hours of the day.

As of 2017, there were at least fifty-four thousand mini-storage sites in the United States, with enough rentable space to cover all of Palm Springs, California, golf courses included. In recent years, the industry’s annual profits are triple those of Hollywood.

It turns out that particular unit is the reason Sharon Kadet is now pulling up in her car. She’s the account manager of Empty the Nest, an eight-year-old local business that empties homes of their property. The reasons for these cleanouts vary, but they typically revolve around downsizing and death. Business is booming: by 2030 senior citizens will account for one fifth of the U.S. population. Some of those seniors want to remain in their large single-family homes packed with stuff. But many others downsize, either by their own or someone else’s choice. And some will pass on, leaving the heavy responsibility of cleaning out a life’s accumulations to somebody else. Plenty of companies and individuals will clean out homes and drive the stuff to the dump after skimming the easily marketable objects. But Empty the Nest is unique in its commitment to finding reuse and resale markets before giving up on an object. Empty the Nest has a thrift store, and what can’t be sold there is donated to organizations that might have better luck.

A truck is parked in the driveway beside two storage units with their doors raised. Three crew members are passing boxes from the units into the truck, where they’re stacked neatly. Standing in silent witness is the woman’s son, a retired auto mechanic happy to chat, so long as I don’t ask for his name. “These were my mother’s units. She had a knickknack store. Not antiques, but collectibles.” One unit holds dozens of boxes marked “Beanie Babies” in black marker. I pull back the top flap of one and see it’s packed with colorful stuffed animals. “I looked on Craigslist,” the mechanic tells me. “They’re going for three dollars. But nobody wants them.”

“Mother’s house was full of stuff, so she put it here. You kind of wonder if she had a problem with stuff. They sell it to you on credit.” We both step back and watch as Empty the Nest’s crew methodically stacks boxes of dolls in the truck. “Tell you what,” he tells me. “I won’t leave my kids this kind of mess. My wife and I already decided that.”

Historically, personal identity revolved around religion, civic participation, and pride of (oftentimes small) place. But as those traditional bonds disintegrate in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, brands and objects become a means to curate and project who we are. Users of iPhones “think different” than users of Android-enabled phones do. A Volvo station wagon, a brand and model favored by liberal residents of academic communities, isn’t likely to be found in the drive-through at Chick-fil-A, a fast-food chain favored by conservatives.1 Small acts of consumption add up to a picture of who we are—just ask Google or Facebook, companies that keenly track consumer identities online. And for many Americans, objects packed into a home present the complete curated package.

The idea that a person may reach the end of life with more stuff than he or she can manage is new. For much of human history, senior citizens were among society’s most destitute and left little material evidence of themselves. That changed, like so much else, in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to large houses (the average U.S. house has more than doubled in size since the 1950s), a robust social safety net, and longer lifespans, Americans have had the opportunity to acquire more stuff over a longer period of time than any nation in history. That’s mostly a good thing. Living standards have never been higher. But eventually, people—and their stuff—wear out.

In 1987, Mercedes Gunderson of suburban Edina, Minnesota, moved her mother—and her stuff—from her lifelong home in small-town Wisconsin to the Twin Cities. It was one of four moves that the elder Ms. Gunderson would make during the final seven years of her life. The stress of those relocations made an impression on the younger Ms. Gunderson, and in 1990 she founded what’s believed to be the first U.S. company devoted to moving senior citizens and their stuff: Gentle Transitions.

The business case is simple. Families are geographically scattered and increasingly busy, so someone other than the kids will have to pack Mom and Dad for the move to senior living. It’s a sensitive task. Seniors with three-bedroom houses have more stuff than they can take to their new, much smaller homes in assisted living. So a new job category—“senior move manager”—was created to help them end to end, from the packing to the unpacking. Gentle Transitions is a lucrative and influential business. In 2018, it coordinated more than 1,200 moves in the Twin Cities, for fees that average $1,500 to $3,500 (not including the cost of the moving truck). Gunderson’s son, who owns and operates a California branch of the company, was one of the cofounders of the National Association of Senior Move Managers, a trade association with more than six hundred members in forty U.S. states. As the industry grows, ne...

Freeman has a blonde bob, blue eyes, and endless charisma; I’m not at all surprised when she tells me she’s a former actor, or that she’s scheduled to lead a decluttering seminar in ninety minutes. “When I first arrive at a house, the first thing I do is have a discussion,” she explains. “I want to be a friend, not an adversary. Because that’s how they see me, as someone who throws away stuff.” That’s just the starter. Inevitably, the job is about convincing people to let go and assuring them that the things they love aren’t lost. “There’s a grieving process,” she says. “When you got that wedding china, you were going to keep it forever. I have clients break down.” As possessions are set aside, a more profound grieving takes place. It’s not just the loss of a sentiment; it’s the loss of an identity. The process is made even more difficult by changing tastes. The fine china and antiques appreciated by Americans born in the middle of the twentieth century aren’t in much demand from the younger generations. “People just don’t want it. But seniors want people to want it,” Freeman says. “ ‘Oh, my kids will take it.’ No, they won’t.” It’s not their identity.

Generally, packers sort into five different categories: new, vintage, collectible, and resalable stuff goes to Empty the Nest’s thrift store; reusable stuff too cheap or common for the thrift store is bound for the Salvation Army or a similar charity organization; old electronics are bound for a specialized electronics recycler; recyclable paper and metal goes to a general recycler; and trash is bound for wherever the hauler takes it that day.

A 2016 study sponsored by the British retailer Marks & Spencer and Oxfam, a British confederation of twenty charities, revealed that British closets contain 3.6 billion unworn garments.

Working with Empty the Nest, you learn ‘you bring something in, you take something out.’ ” Prior to World War II, little that Kristy just said would’ve made sense. The United States, like the rest of the world, was still an agrarian society, families were large and localized, and property of any kind was scarce, oftentimes homemade, and valuable. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century practical housekeeping manuals (a genre that’s largely disappeared) were, in many respects, repair manuals.3 Some included basic cement recipes to aid in the repair of broken dishes. Others offered advice on basic strategies to prolong the usable lifespan of pottery, ironware, and glass. What little a parent or grandparent owned and left behind was bequeathed to the next generation for uninterrupted use.

As the industrial revolution drew families into cities and mass-production jobs, society’s relationship to stuff began to change, and modern notions of “waste” emerged. For example, in traditional farming communities, food scraps are fertilizer. But the nineteenth-century urban tenements into which rural families relocated provided little space or opportunity to “recycle” food. In the absence of waste collection, food scraps often literally went out of the window, into the streets. In 1842 the New York Daily News estimated that ten thousand pigs were roaming the streets of New York, consuming mostly organic garbage. Modern trash collection and disposal had yet to be invented.

Of course, a preindustrial agrarian lifestyle is more environmentally sustainable than a modern one. But so too is the brutish nomadic life that preceded the development of agriculture. Nobody is clamoring for either, and it bears repeating that neither is worth romanticizing: sanitation and nutrition were poorer, and the average lifespan was considerably shorter and less interesting. No doubt, there are downsides to an economy built on mass production and consumption. Factory production, in particular, can take a significant toll on air and water quality. But even in places where that toll is most tangible, such as contemporary China, consumers understandably embrace mass production and urbanization over the alternatives.

“I sometimes get mad at people. They buy things for no other reason than it’s cheap. And they hold on to things that people gave to them. ‘Oh, it meant so much,’ ” she says sarcastically. “Well, what’re you going to do with it?”

In Japan, the population isn’t just aging—it’s declining. Often, there isn’t just a dearth of relatives to claim and clean up what’s left behind. Often, there isn’t even somebody to hire someone to perform the cleanout. Meanwhile, homes packed with belongings and garbage—hoarder houses, in the American parlance—are discovered daily. That’s a state of affairs very much at odds with the image projected by Marie Kondo and other representatives of Japan’s minimalist and decluttering movements. But it’s worth noting that part of the reason those movements have achieved popularity in Japan is that the Japanese want decluttered homes as much as Americans do. In that sense, Marie Kondo is preparing her readers outside Japan for a future that few consumers outside Japan care to anticipate.

Han’s business card lists three professional accreditations: a government license to sell secondhand goods; a certification from Japan’s National Association of Cleanout Professionals, an organization representing eight thousand of Japan’s cleanout companies; and, from the same organization, an accreditation as a shukatsu counselor. The last is unique to Japan. During the country’s post–World War II reconstruction and economic boom, shukatsu described the process of finding a job. But in recent years, older Japanese have changed the first Japanese character in shukatsu so that it takes on a new, grimly ironic meaning: the process of preparing for the end. The need is acute. In 2018, Japan celebrated 921,000 births—and mourned 1.369 million deaths.

Japan’s asset bubble burst in the early 1990s, sinking the economy into a recession and a decades-long stagnation. Since then, regular employment has progressively given way to low-paying, benefits-poor, irregular jobs, especially for younger Japanese. Economic insecurity has forced those young Japanese to put off marriage and children—or skip them altogether. What’s left behind is one of the world’s most aged societies, millions of homes filled with property accumulated during Japan’s boom years, and a dearth of heirs. Japan is already home to eight million unoccupied homes, colloquially known as “ghost homes.” By 2040, the total amount of vacated residential real estate in Japan could equal the total area of Austria,

These days, even Buddhist monks are getting into the business. As Hamada explains it, Japanese Shinto and Buddhism posit that spirits come to inhabit objects that have been used for years. “Families go to the monks and temples after the death for prayers,” Hamada says. “And then the monks go to the home and clean it out.” It’s such an attractive business model that some cleanout companies are working directly with the temples, offering to tie up the deceased’s spiritual and material needs in one simple package.

It strikes me that the desire to see one’s things take on a second life is as much a matter of vanity as it is a concern for the planet or dismay at waste. It’s as if she’s saying that her stuff is worthy.

I think Marie Kondo has been popular in Japan for the same reasons she’s popular in the U.S. and other relatively affluent, mass-consumer societies. Which is that she is addressing the problem of an abundance or excess of stuff, which is a problem only if you’re of a certain class and can afford to have an abundance and excess of stuff. And she doesn’t actually address the consumption side of things. Some people say it’s implied that you should make do with less stuff. But she doesn’t actually address how and why stuff ends up in your home in the first place.

For jobs that require she also do some cleaning, she acquired safety training similar to what a mortician might receive. Thanks to the thousands of Japanese who die alone every week, that work accounts for around 30 percent of the business.

Han steps away from the kitchen, takes out her iPhone, and scrolls through photos of cleanouts. “See,” she says as she stops on a photo of a bed. The mattress is stained with a dark shadow in the shape of a body. “I don’t remove the body,” she says. “But I had to receive the training to clean what’s left.” She keeps scrolling, through images of hair still stuck to tatami mats, a pile of garbage upon which a body was found, and an entire decomposing body on a bed. She captures the images when she’s visiting a potential client to bid on a job. If she lands it, those images prepare her and the crew for what they’ll encounter.

We stride into a well-lit storage space that’s divided by hundreds of red and blue carts holding roughly forty beat-up banker’s boxes each. According to Kominato, the individual boxes contain at least twenty used books, DVDs, and CDs that their owners are selling to Bookoff Online, Bookoff’s rapidly expanding e-commerce unit. Rather than go through the trouble of taking them to a used bookshop, they take advantage of a process Bookoff has designed to simplify the process of unloading stuff: simply pack a box, print a shipping label, and call for a pickup. Kominato says that Bookoff receives around 3,000 boxes per day containing around 150,000 items, the vast majority of which are books. This is no cleanout; it’s a black hole that sucks in volumes the moment a book owner loosens her grip. We walk up a set of stairs to the second floor. As we emerge on the landing, I step back to let a worker push past with a cart the size of a hot tub filled waist-high with hundreds of books. “Those are being recycled,” Kominato says. Bookoff is Japan’s largest used-book buyer and seller. But not every used book has a buyer and, as a result, Bookoff is likely Japan’s largest book recycler, too. According to Kominato, the company sends thirty-five thousand tons of books to paper recyclers every year. That’s three and a half times the weight of the Eiffel Tower, measured out in individual, unwanted volumes: romances, histories, dictionaries, classics, cookbooks. It’s a heartbreaking number—es...

As more and more Americans could afford new clothes, the distance between the poor and the rich became one defined by taste; the poor could dress just as elegantly as the rich, as long as they were open to being a season or two out-of-date.

The individuals taken on by Goodwill are often the hardest, most expensive cases, the ones that government won’t, or can’t, handle on its own; and they—not secondhand stuff—inspire the greatest passion among Goodwill employees (regardless of whether those employees are involved in social services). For example, Pima County, home to Tucson, has a large population of youths who haven’t completed high school, many of whom end up in the juvenile justice system. So, under Gulick, the organization has refocused its efforts on helping them in ways ranging from paying for GED test-taking fees to subsidizing salaries so that skeptical employers will take on at-risk youth. “We had thirteen hundred job placements last year,” Gulick says. “So that tells you we’re using that economic engine in the right way.”

For example, yesterday this Goodwill had a production goal of $4,787 worth of sorted, priced clothes. It beat that goal by producing 1,115 garments worth $5,657. Most of that production won’t sell here. At this store, roughly 45 percent of the product on the sales floor sells (up from 33 percent a few years ago). That’s high for an American thrift store, but maintaining that sales percentage is incredibly difficult. During a walkthrough, Kevin Cunningham, director of retail operations for Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona, summarized the challenge for me: Think of it as Walmart headquarters calling a Walmart store manager and saying, “You’ve got a truck of product coming.” The manager is like, “Okay, yeah, I know.” And the manager in HQ is like, “And oh, by the way, we don’t know what’s in that truck—no one thing in the truck is the same as any other one thing. And oh, by the way, you need to price all of it. And oh, by the way, you definitely need to make a profit selling it.”

At eight A.M., Cathy pauses in the middle of her Goodwill sales floor. She’s standing next to an endcap filled with new kitchen utensils, like wooden spoons and plastic spatulas. Around the corner are stacks of secondhand pots and pans. “What’s with all the new stuff?” I ask. She glances at the line of people outside her store. This really isn’t the time for an in-depth discussion of retailing strategy. But Cathy, famously patient, offers an answer: “They’d buy it at Walmart if we didn’t sell it. Since we can’t sell used shower caps, we sell new, and people can do most of their shopping here.” “Do you sell much?” “New is eight or nine percent of our sales.”

As cashiers ring up carts, clothes hangers pile up at the end of the counters. Cathy, in between taking handbags and other collectibles from the display cabinets, gathers them up and hangs them from nearby clothing racks placed just for that purpose. “At the end of the day, we’ll have four or five thousand hangers,” she says. I think I misheard. “How many?” “Four or five thousand. We’ll wrap them in sets of tens and put them out for sale. Typically sell around three hundred.” She grabs another bundle from a register. “The world does not need to make any more hangers.”

Christie’s, the global auction house that sells collectibles at the very highest end of the market—and, in essence, that’s what a million-dollar chair is—has seen the prices of some traditional European furniture decline by as much as 70 percent in less than a generation.

For decades, the collectibles market made sense. Demand for unique, precious things outpaced the supply, and so the price went up. What’s changed is that notions of what’s unique and precious have gone down-market. The ancient Greek statuary sought out by nostalgic and admiring ancient Roman aristocrats was definitely rare. Thus, the price was and is high. But a mint-condition Star Wars figure in original packaging? They sometimes sell for tens of thousands of dollars (a Boba Fett in the original package went for $27,000 in 2015), even though there are millions in existence (unpackaged). Will that packaged-price premium still hold fifty, one hundred, or two hundred years from now? I doubt it.

Dick walks me around to another display case, this one filled with Hummel figurines—small German porcelains, mostly in the shape of children, first manufactured in the 1930s in so-called limited editions that numbered in the many thousands. In the 1970s, collectors—generally Americans who’d benefited from the great post–World War II economy and had cash in their pockets—started collecting. “We used to sell them for three hundred to four hundred dollars each,” Dick says as he points to a 60% OFF! sign. “Now we can’t discount the damn things enough.” He throws up his hands. “Dolls. My wife and I used to make two thousand to four thousand dollars every weekend selling dolls in the nineties. Now they don’t sell at all.” “Why?” “Nostalgia. And for a few years [the people who loved them] had excess cash in their pockets. Mortgage paid, kids done with college. So they buy.” Eventually mortality catches up, and all those mass-produced items revert to a value that’s more reflective of their practical—not nostalgic—value. Which in most cases is zero.

“The migrant workers are the big buyers here,” he explains, referring to the Indonesian and South Asian immigrants who power the city’s construction projects and service businesses. “Buying clothes and phones and shoes and other things they actually use.” We pause at a far end of the market, where piles of beat-up shoes are laid out on tarps beside stacks of old jeans. Two Indonesian workers dressed in blue construction-crew uniforms are rummaging through the shoes. One holds four pairs. “They’ll bring them back home to Indonesia to sell,” Kenny says. Nostalgia-inducing school pins and obsolete phones won’t be on the shopping list. That’s the secondhand market for the wealthy.

“Whenever there’s a gap between wealth and poverty, there will be a secondhand industry,”

When that cart is empty, it’ll be filled up with stuff tipped from a just-delivered cage, and the washing machine box will be set aside until it’s loaded onto a truck bound for Goodwill Industries of Southern Arizona’s central warehouse. For almost everything, that’s the end of the line. The unsold clothing will be repacked for export to destinations around the world. But the hard goods—toys, mixers, bowling balls, planters, and everything else that constitutes the universe of what most Americans think of as “stuff”—are done. Some might get sorted out for recycling, but most everything else is landfill-bound. There’s just not much else that can be done with an unwanted plastic toy airplane, a beat-up particleboard television cabinet, or a vacuum cleaner hose missing its vacuum. If there were, Goodwill would’ve tried it.

For example, one truck will be dropping off “product” at a store on Midvale that doesn’t get enough donations, before picking up excess donations at another store in an affluent neighborhood. “People call me up from the stores and say, ‘I need wares!’ ” He laughs. “Oh well, I’ll tell the donors!” But he’s not joking, entirely. Goodwill chooses its store and donation sites in part on where it expects to receive donations that can feed into stores that don’t receive enough. When Schmidt dispatches trucks, he’s bridging social and income inequalities.

Over the years, critics of the globalized secondhand-clothing trade allege that it undermines textile industries in developing regions, especially in Africa. It’s a potent claim that has intuitive power. Africa is the largest market for secondhand clothes globally, and has been for several decades. Meanwhile, its textile industries have declined precipitously since the 1980s. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, textile production dropped by 83 percent between 1990 and 1996. In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, a textile industry that employed as many as two hundred thousand in the 1970s has dwindled to almost nothing. In Kenya, home to some of the world’s largest secondhand-clothing markets, a textile industry that employed as many as five hundred thousand people in the 1980s now employs fewer than fifty thousand. Geographers and other academics have created a small industry to prove the claim.

Since the mid-2000s, Ghana’s labor-union leadership has blamed two related phenomena for the decline of the country’s once-thriving textile industry: pirating of Ghanaian brands and styles by low-cost Chinese firms and the large-scale evasion of Ghanaian custom duties by East Asian exporters.5 They have a point. For example, production of kente cloth, the colorful Ghanaian fabric once exported around Africa and the world, employed thirty thousand people as recently as the 1980s. Since then, Chinese counterfeits have flooded the market and devastated producers (Ghanaian kente manufacturers employ fewer than three thousand today).6 At Ghanaian markets, buyers can expect to pay far more for locally produced, and so naturally opt for low-cost Chinese imports. The situation for Ghanaian kente producers is so dire that a government-sponsored initiative to encourage people to wear traditional Ghanaian clothes on Fridays is widely derided as a jobs program for the Chinese.

Back in the car, Mohammad tells me that Canada’s increasing labor costs, partly driven by a law that raises the minimum wage, are pushing the grading businesses to Pakistan. “It’s the difference between three hundred dollars per month for a grader and fifteen hundred dollars per month. If the price of the clothes was rising, it wouldn’t matter. But the price is falling.” It occurs to me that somebody will have to pay for that shipping; and in the case of less valuable items, it won’t make sense to export them at all. I think of Tucson and Erich Schmidt’s salvage yard. “That’ll mean less reuse, won’t it?” “Maybe,” Mohammad says slowly.

That’s one of the reasons Michael is working with me as a paid translator and fixer; two weeks earlier, Nigeria imposed new restrictions on the movement of used cars, all but halting business at the Cotonou car markets (it would pick up again a few months later). He is a tall man with a round, bald head and eyes that squint as if he’s always scrutinizing a deal. He’s well read on current events and vocally opinionated. Obama, he considers a failure; Trump, a “real man.” And secondhand goods, he insists, are better than new. As we walk, he pulls at his shirt. “This is secondhand.” He tugs at his pants. “These are secondhand.” He takes out a Samsung phone from Verizon. “Secondhand,” he huffs. “Americans are trained. They’re trained. Something new, they get rid of the old one. Put it out for recycling, don’t even care. Give it away. Maybe a charity makes a little money for the office.” I glance down at his feet. He’s wearing a pair of new brown suede shoes. Yesterday, he was wearing a pair of old Nike running shoes. In between, I paid him.

Mr. A tells me that he purchases five shipping containers of clothing per week—when the Nigerian currency is strong. “But now less, due to the economy.” “What kinds of clothes?” “We are interested in importing durable clothes, not cheap ones. If someone in the West has worn something and it comes here, it’s probably durable.” “Even if it’s made in China.” “Not everything from China is bad. Just what the Chinese send to Africa is bad. They save the good things for rich countries.”

It’s a common sentiment among secondhand-goods traders in Africa, and there’s some truth to it. China’s manufacturers long ago mastered techniques for manufacturing similar goods to sell at a profit at different price points. A fashionable shirt, one made to the quality standards expected in the United States and sold for $29.99 there, can be made for much lower quality standards (lower thread counts, for example) and can sell—profitably—for $2.99 in Cotonou. The quality of the fabric and the stitching won’t be nearly as good. But it will be new and fashionable, and for many consumers that matters more than durability.

“We are picky in Africa,” he says. “We don’t want garbage. We want fashion. We want quality. Not your garbage.” “Do people send garbage?” His mouth stretches into a mean, toothy smile. “Not if they want to be paid. They learn what we will take. We are not a dump.” That’s an opinion at odds with fashionable Western perceptions and critiques of the secondhand-clothing trade. Instead of viewing it as an exchange of goods driven by African demand, Western critics tend to view it as an exchange between the savvy and the ignorant. Take, for example, Whitney Mallett, a documentary filmmaker who wrote about the secondhand-clothing trade for the New Republic in 2015.9 She describes visiting a New Jersey grading plant with Michael Zweig, the plant’s manager: By far, the most common labels here that I see are Forever 21 and H&M, fated for the cheap pile. “Nobody is stupid enough to buy Forever 21 second-hand,” notes Zweig. No one in the developed world, anyway. Mallett’s “no one in the developed world” isn’t just bigoted. It’s blind to how much value is created when less affluent people are given the opportunity to parse the goods of the wasteful affluent. The grading warehouses of Cotonou exist because sorters and graders in New Jersey (or Mississauga) don’t know enough about Nigeria and the tastes of its consumers to sort clothes for them. That doesn’t make New Jersey’s clothing graders stupid. It just means they’re underinformed compared with their developing-world counterparts.

Ashif says that even the good-quality textiles sometimes fail to find a market these days. That makes him work harder. For example, Levi’s that once had a vintage market are now shipped to Bangkok, where workers cut away the buttons and zippers to be sold to the makers of fake Levi’s.