Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

by Adam Minter

“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.