Full disclosure: ReSOURCE is my second home.
More precisely, the stuff I’ve acquired from Vermont’s largest homegrown thrift-store chain fills much of my actual home. The store’s never-ending stream of affordably priced, donated goods has supplied the scuffed-up oil painting that hangs on my apartment wall and the plastic storage containers I use to organize my pantry.
I wear $3 button-up shirts to the office and, last summer, attended a wedding in $2 leather shoes that I plucked from the repurposed meat coolers where ReSOURCE displays footwear at its flagship store in Williston. The soles fell apart soon thereafter.
I’ve purchased a steel bicycle as a gift ($40) and an illustrated manual on how to give a good massage ($1). To save money, I recently gave up weekend trips to local coffee shops by buying a used $50 Nespresso machine. ReSOURCE functions as the enabler of my growing collection of ceramic dog figurines and a means by which I, at age 35, try to pull together the trappings of a middle-class life when that is more expensive than ever.
The Burlington area, where I live, boasts many sources for secondhand scores. Several houses of worship run small charity shops. More than a dozen consignment stores and vintage markets offer curated selections of used goods at higher prices. Some people sell their possessions — or resell their ReSOURCE finds — on Facebook Marketplace, Front Porch Forum and Poshmark. Others donate items directly to their neighbors through “Buy Nothing” groups on Facebook or by placing them on the curb.
Every day, ReSOURCE showrooms look less like the rummage sales of generations past and more like department stores, if a bit scruffier.
Nonprofits such as ReSOURCE form the base of this ecosystem. They are the photosynthesizing agents that convert piles of cast-offs into appealing displays of goods for purchase at prices almost anyone can afford. This engine of reuse has been dubbed the “circular economy” and promoted as one antidote to the many ills, environmental and otherwise, that are typically linked to modern consumerism.
In recent years, thrift stores have found themselves perfectly positioned to capitalize on the vintage tastes of many young people and serve as a haven from the inflated prices of new products. The especially high cost of living in Vermont buoys demand for thrifted goods, while an aging population of wealthier residents supports an ample supply of donations. The dawn of a global trade war and the prospect of an economic recession will only nourish the thrift bonanza.
ReSOURCE was founded in Burlington in 1991 with a mission of poverty relief, environmental stewardship and job training. The nonprofit’s reuse division now operates four stores, in Burlington, Barre, Morrisville and Williston. The Williston site, which opened in 2018 on Harvest Lane, is by far the largest. The donation and reuse center is a rambling assemblage of warehouse and sorting space, administrative offices, and two floors of retail that together encompass 47,000 square feet, more than an acre.
A similarly sized Goodwill operates just around the corner, and Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity, the local arm of a national nonprofit focused on homebuilding, runs a large, unaffiliated ReStore a couple miles down Route 2A.
The trio comprise a Williston shopping district that offers a commercial counterpoint to the Walmart and other big-box stores nearby. This industry has roughly doubled in size in the past five years. Sales at ReSOURCE’s thrift shops increased from $1.9 million in 2019 to almost $3.2 million last year. Similarly, Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity reported on tax forms a doubling of revenue at its Williston, Milton and Swanton ReStores — close in name to ReSOURCE, but an independent operation — between 2018 and 2023, the most recent year available, from $1.3 million to $2.6 million.
ReSOURCE has managed to maintain the largest thrift-store footprint of the big three in north-central Vermont, even though Habitat for Humanity and Goodwill have wider name recognition and national blueprints for how to run their local businesses. Every day, ReSOURCE showrooms look less like the rummage sales of generations past and more like department stores, if a bit scruffier.
In recent weeks, I restrained my shopper’s impulse in order to get a reporter’s-eye view of ReSOURCE’s Williston operation. Managers at the nonprofit seemed a little nervous about letting me shadow employees in the sorting warehouse and on the showroom floor. Thrifting may be a nonprofit endeavor, but it’s also a messy, competitive, delicate business.
Far from the boutiques of Church Street or the tony gift shops in Stowe, ReSOURCE reflects Vermont as truly as any other shopping destination. At the donation bay, in the sorting room and on the showroom floor, it’s where people of widely differing means and circumstances come together — indirectly, at least — through one of the things that really binds us: our stuff.
‘Clothes Mountain’
Kelly Grimes pulled into the donation bay around noon on a recent Tuesday. She popped open the hatchback of her black BMW, and within seconds, ReSOURCE employee Kylee Clayton was standing near the trunk. She carried a couple bags of Grimes’ belongings into the receiving area. The drop-off lasted less than a minute.
Grimes told me that she had sold her Colchester home and was planning to move to New Hampshire the following week to be closer to her kids.
She’d made a point to donate the items she was leaving behind so that someone else could use them. “We all came from somewhere,” she said.
But Grimes was careful not to overstate her generosity. She rubbed her fingers across the windowsill of her pristine Beamer. “I like some luxuries,” she said, “as you can see.”
Grimes was beginning to tell me about her daughter, who she said “thrifts a lot,” when Clayton politely broke in to point out that my interview was holding up the line. Three more cars were idling behind us.
Last year, ReSOURCE took in nearly a million donated items at its four locations. That’s nearly double the 500,000 it received in 2019. The actual number is higher, because a box of books or bag of clothes is typically counted as one item.
There is no shortage of stuff. You can shop at ReSOURCE in Williston seven days a week, but the donation center closes on Mondays so the sorters can catch up on what invariably becomes a backlog of goods. Employees refer to the piles of apparel that can stack up in the warehouse as “clothes mountain.”
“Mountain” season is nearing. As the fickle April weather gives way to warmer temperatures, residents’ spring cleaning will direct mounds of new products to ReSOURCE and other thrift stores. The spring rush then gets new energy from Chittenden County’s annual turnover in rental properties, partly driven by college students, which takes place in May and June.
ReSOURCE asks its donors to bring only “gently used” goods. Its website lists more than 140 categories of items that it does or does not accept. But for donors who are parting with their belongings, convenience trumps the details.
“We want to give the donor a good experience,” operations director Garth Allen told me. “We’re not going to look at every single item.”
The system works, most of the time. Disposing of items at the landfill costs money; thrift stores take them for free. So occasionally sorters will open a bag of clothes and catch a whiff of something rancid. ReSOURCE also receives plenty of stuff that its customers aren’t interested in buying. The nonprofit’s employees then have to figure out what to do with pit-stained T-shirts or 1,000-piece puzzles with only 997. The thrift store, Williston store assistant manager Jim Cavoretto emphasized, is not “a dumping ground for junk.”
Employees fill industrial-grade laundry hampers, dollies and shopping carts with the donated goods, then roll them into the main warehouse. There, “reuse specialists” inspect and price each item. In one corner, employees plug in and test small appliances, such as toasters. Vinyl records, CDs and cassettes are diverted to a separate room until 76-year-old Andy Meilleur, a longtime volunteer and music aficionado, has a chance to inspect and price them. Housewares, office supplies and knickknacks are arranged in rows of carts. Apparel is sent up to a mezzanine level where a team of specialists sorts and prices items.
It’s fast-paced, demanding work in a clamorous warehouse that is subject to temperature swings and the tang of old shoes, lacks high-tech efficiencies, and where the pay starts at around $16 per hour. The unpredictable flow of products adds to the challenge. Eric L’Esperance, who runs the Williston store’s computer and electronics department, maintains a shelf of orphaned televisions and computer monitors that were donated without a power cord. He keeps the devices around in case a compatible cable comes through the doors, so that he can save them from the e-waste stream.
While I interviewed one reuse specialist, another let out a shriek upon discovering a spider crawling through a box of office binders that she was pricing.
“Tough guys wilt over there,” Cavoretto said of the warehouse.
ReSOURCE takes its reuse mission seriously, but there are limits. On a recent Tuesday morning, a man piled bags of clothes into a box truck stationed in a far loading bay. Donated apparel that is stained or threadbare or doesn’t sell by season’s end gets bagged and picked up by a company that “grades” and redirects clothes that retail thrift stores can’t sell. As much as one-third of donated apparel ends up as rags or is shipped overseas to developing countries, part of a tide of discarded clothing from around the world that has swamped some African countries. The week before I’d arrived, the Williston ReSOURCE sent away 438 bags of clothing. Come May, that figure will double.
‘We Can Still
Make It Look Good’
Vince Knecht, the store’s 61-year-old merchandising lead, peered down into one of the glass display cases that encircle the cash registers.
“Somebody bought the Care Bear!” Knecht, 61, yelled.
ReSOURCE was selling a stash of collectibles that Cavoretto, the assistant store manager, had set aside from the sorting carts in the warehouse. Knecht had just placed a talking Woody doll, of Toy Story fame, onto a nearby shelf alongside some other vintage toys. Woody still had his cowboy hat and pull-string mechanism, but his one-liners (“There’s a snake in my boot!”) now had a balky quality, making him sound tipsy. He wasn’t quite good enough for the glass cases. ReSOURCE would try to sell him for $9.99.
Knecht’s job is to make all the other misfit collectibles look appealing to ReSOURCE’s customers, because the organization needs to sell its products quickly. Prices are low, space is limited, and new donations come through the doors every few minutes. “It’s all about the turn,” operations director Allen told me.
“So be it that it’s in the grocery coolers. We can still make it look good.” Jen LaCasse
Knecht, who moves constantly about the store with an eye on a display or some object in hand, has a doctorate in special education. He moved to Vermont in 2023 after retiring from public schools in eastern Pennsylvania, then took a job at ReSOURCE.
Each product display in the show room should convey a story, Knecht said. The glass cases near the register projected an air of childhood nostalgia. Among the treasures were an early hardback copy of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, a “Barbie and the Rockers” play set from 1985 in the original box, and a Buzz Lightyear doll made of clear plastic, which, unlike his pal Woody, warranted presentation in the display case.
“It’s usually grown men” who show interest in the vintage figures, front end lead Gwen Mathews, 22, has noticed. “They’re really excited about it.”
This emphasis on “merchandising,” as product presentation is known among retailers, is a recent development in the organization’s 34-year-old history. I’ve noticed it during my own shopping trips at all four ReSOURCE locations. Manager Deb Kelly is chiefly responsible for the more polished look at the Williston store. She joined in 2023, after spending most of her nearly 40-year retail career at the Country Christmas Loft in Shelburne, where visual product appeal is imperative.
On a mission to make the thrift store “clean, neat and presentable,” Kelly put in place professional signage throughout the store. “I categorized and grouped things. I did eye-level. I did clear, concise presentations,” she said. Employees got trained on different types of glassware, so they can keep the pilsner glasses separate from the pint glasses.
“Sales have gone through the roof,” Kelly boasted. She showed me the recently reorganized office-supply department. Binders, rid of their cobwebs, were stacked in rows on shelves, spines facing the customer. “I tripled — tripled! — sales in a month,” she said, flashing me the office department data on her cellphone to prove it.
When ReSOURCE recently received a taxidermied bust of a mountain goat, employees mounted it on a wall with a $199.99 price sticker. It sold in about a week.
On a recent Thursday, I took note of a number of unusual objects for sale, curious to see how many would sell during one weekend rush. Days later, a modern gray couch ($164.99), a vintage Timex watch ($4.99), a stainless-steel French press ($7.99) and a pig-shaped ceramic platter ($2.99) had been sold. Still awaiting a new home were a Popeye VHS tape (50 cents), a ceramic cookie jar shaped like a designer handbag ($9.99) and a red leather ottoman with squeaky wheels ($19.99).
Taming the mess helps ReSOURCE appeal to more customers and provides a more dignified shopping experience. It’s also a matter of staying competitive. As Knecht was arranging the collectibles in display cases, cashiers across town at the Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity ReStore were handing out 25 percent-off coupons for that shop’s new online boutique.
The merchandising transformation at ReSOURCE has been most dramatic in the store’s huge clothing department, located on the ground floor. Apparel represents one of the largest thrift markets in North America, yet ReSOURCE only started selling clothes a few years ago, during the pandemic. The department swelled in size after ReSOURCE’s ground-floor tenant, Natural Provisions grocery store, went out of business in 2020, leaving the nonprofit without crucial rental income to help pay its mortgage.
To make up for the shortfall, ReSOURCE piled the heaps of donated clothing it was amassing and offered them for sale to customers who were willing — or desperate enough — to brave the bins. Other items were stuffed into the commercial display coolers that had previously held vegetables and prepared meats.
Today, the clothes are carefully arranged by size and type on chrome display racks, with sections for infants, preteens and more. Prices range from 25 cents for a baby bib to $6.99 for a winter coat. At season’s change, clothing lead Jen LaCasse organizes a weeklong sale where everything is $1. During the most recent event, in March, she sold 1,500 pieces in a single day.
“We’re able to have higher sales now without inflating our pricing by making it a more shop-able, organized, homey place,” LaCasse said.
ReSOURCE still uses the old Natural Provisions coolers to display luggage, footwear, stuffed animals and other textile products.
“So be it that it’s in the grocery coolers,” LaCasse said. “We can still make it look good.”
Behind the Boom
Demand for ReSOURCE’s goods has surged in almost every department.
The same has been true at Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores, that organization’s CEO, David Mullin, told me.
His thrift stores, which support the nonprofit’s homebuilding work, have never been busier. Its Williston store opened 13 years ago with 7,000 square feet. “I thought, Oh, my God, how are we ever going to fill this space?” Mullin said. Habitat has since taken over thousands more square feet.
“If I had another 5,000 square feet in Williston, I’d take it in a heartbeat,” Mullin said.
Yet this boom in thrifting does not seem to have reduced the state’s waste stream. Consider textiles, which make up more waste in Vermont, by weight, than electronics and furniture combined. The amount of textiles, including consumer apparel, that went to the landfill jumped from 18,000 tons in 2018 to 24,000 tons in 2023, according to a state study.
“While Vermont has seen some increase in convenient clothing recycling options in the past few years, domestic and global textile recycling options are limited, and reuse options are hampered by the lower quality of clothing and textiles being produced,” the Vermont materials management plan states.
“Consumers — those who can afford it — are buying brand-new stuff. Often, they don’t keep it very long.” Tom Longstreth
Thrift stores are helping to mitigate Vermonters’ wastefulness and the rise of an industry of cheaply made, quickly dated apparel known as fast fashion, but they can’t solve it.
I asked ReSOURCE’s longtime executive director, Tom Longstreth, what is driving the thrift industry’s growth here. Longstreth cited the popularity of thrifting among young people, which has helped remake its image as a fashionable lifestyle. He noted, too, its attractiveness to environmentally conscious shoppers and donors.
In the broadest sense, though, thrift stores offer a snapshot of economic inequality, Longstreth said.
“Our economy is being driven by consumer spending,” Longstreth said. “So consumers — those who can afford it — are buying brand-new stuff. Often, they don’t keep it very long. They move, they pass it on to reuse stores.”
At the other end, reuse customers are more likely to be people who are pinched by the high cost of living, the housing shortage and inflation.
If ReSOURCE were to open a fifth location, Longstreth said, “we’d go to a community that has really poor areas, who need our stuff, and then really rich people who can afford to keep buying brand-new stuff and, in turn, passing stuff on.”
Longstreth, 58, is a cheery, unimposing guy with narrow eyes and white hair. He’s been running ReSOURCE for nearly 30 years, growing it from an appliance repair and resale shop with eight employees called Recycle North when he joined in 1996 to the 140-person thrift and job-training enterprise that it is today. He works above the Williston store in an office with an awkwardly slanted ceiling and exposed sprinkler heads. He attended Dartmouth College and later got a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University.
Longstreth made $118,000 in 2023, a fraction of what his counterparts elsewhere make. Goodwill Northern New England, the Maine-based arm of the national nonprofit that operates 31 stores, including locations in South Burlington and Williston, paid $442,000 to a pair of CEOs last year.
The thrift business isn’t Longstreth’s primary passion. He’s drawn to ReSOURCE’s interconnected mission of poverty relief, environmental stewardship and job training. In the early days, ReSOURCE trained technicians to repair appliances, which it would then sell cheaply at its small reuse store in Burlington to people who needed them.
The work has many other dimensions today. ReSOURCE trains more than 300 people each year in the trades, including at six-week intensive courses that focus on job placement. It also sends young people to help build houses in partnership with Habitat for Humanity, its thrift competitor. ReSOURCE still maintains an appliance repair shop. High school students with disabilities come to ReSOURCE’s Williston store during the day to learn practical skills from training manager Ari Anaya. Anaya helped improve the social confidence of one student by assigning them to greet customers at the front door.
ReSOURCE also functions as an employer of second chances. LaCasse, the clothing lead, started in Williston as a volunteer, earning service hours that she needed as part of her residence at a sober house. Sixteen months later, LaCasse — who had fashion merchandising experience before alcoholism derailed her life — still lives at the sober house, but she’s been promoted at ReSOURCE, twice.
ReSOURCE’s tripartite mission isn’t always easy to explain to donors and customers. While I shopped at the Barre store last month, a recording of Longstreth’s voice played over the showroom floor. He encouraged customers to support ReSOURCE by posing a question that most customers had probably never asked themselves: “How are we going to weatherize 80,000 homes without a trained workforce?”
ReSOURCE tells its shoppers and donors that their support helps the nonprofit fulfill its job-training mission. But Longstreth admits that financial connection remains largely aspirational.
Even with the surge in sales revenue, the stores are “basically break-even.”
‘All the dealers
come here’
When the Williston ReSOURCE opened its doors on a recent Tuesday, at 10 a.m., half a dozen customers were already huddled beneath the front awning, waiting to shop.
One of the door-busting shoppers, a man in a red jacket, bought a few things. Gwen Mathews was working the register. “Do you sell jewelry?” she asked her customer, taking note of his purchases.
After paying for his items, the man, who wouldn’t give his name, told me he maintains a booth at nearby flea markets. He visits several thrift stores in the area in search of cheap treasures that he can resell.
“All the dealers come here,” he told me.
Resale is pervasive in the thrift industry. Even if you haven’t shopped at ReSOURCE, you may have purchased one of its products somewhere else. That same Tuesday, while wandering through the shop, I inspected an ornately framed reproduction of a Rembrandt painting, titled, per the faded label on the back, “Young Girl at Open Half Door.” I think it cost $20. Two days later, while perusing Facebook Marketplace, the same painting with the same label appeared as one of “today’s picks.” Someone was offering it for $50.
Longstreth sounded a sanguine note about resellers. Serving as a wholesaler for pickers and side hustlers, he said, is just part of the thrift stores’ niche as a “first-level” reuse marketplace.
But all the big thrift stores, ReSOURCE included, have made an effort to identify and more accurately price the collectibles that come their way. They do this both to preserve some of these choice finds for customers who intend to keep them and to capture a larger portion of that resale value for their nonprofits.
Reuse specialist Tammy LaCroix-Hopkins spearheads part of this effort at the Williston store. LaCroix-Hopkins recently took on the role of overseeing the clothing department’s new “specialty priced” racks for well-known brands that are especially coveted by discerning Vermont consumers. Now, other sorters set aside all Carhartt clothing for her review, even if the item has stains or small tears.
LaCroix-Hopkins works at her own station in the warehouse, alongside a Radio Flyer wagon she’s dubbed her “awesome employee.” Her work area features a plastic replica of Thing, the severed “Addams Family” hand, and a graveyard of eight worn-out pricing guns.
When I interviewed her, LaCroix-Hopkins was puzzling over a rabbit fur jacket, in near-mint condition, if somewhat gaudy. “That’s going to be a very high-end piece,” she said.
LaCroix-Hopkins searched the garment on Google, which turned up online prices ranging from $30 to several hundred dollars. She eventually settled on $185.
Striking the right balance on valuable items proves tricky: Thrift customers are price-sensitive. I spoke with Sherry and Jan Morin, former Bristol residents who moved to Crown Point, N.Y., years ago because the cost of living there was lower.
Sherry had a dental appointment in Burlington, so the couple made a point to swing through ReSOURCE while in town. Sherry bought some clothes.
The Morins don’t shop at the nearby Goodwill — prices there are too high, they said. Local thrift stores such as ReSOURCE, Jan complained, are “getting expensive,” too.
“If it’s used clothing, I’m not gonna pay what I would have to pay at Walmart or somewhere,” Sherry said.
ReSOURCE offers an “essential goods” program in which it provides shopping vouchers to social service agencies, which in turn pass the vouchers — gift cards, basically — to their clients. Its electronics department offers refurbished laptops for as low as $80.
But there’s no way around it: Reselling is one of the reasons that thrift-store prices have gone up for the rest of us.
I say “the rest of us,” but I, too, have flipped a ReSOURCE find. A while back, I picked up a tattered 7-inch vinyl record from the Williston store for 50 cents. The record was sheathed in a crumpled, black-and-white sleeve that had a tantalizing title, Phonopoetica, and appeared to be inscribed by the artist. It turned out to be a rare, experimental work from the ’70s by a renowned Hungarian poet and performer, Katalin Ladik.
I kept the record in my collection for months, but earlier this year, some bills stacked up, and I needed extra cash. I took the rare disc, along with a stack of others, to a local record store. The shop, in turn, listed my sound-poetry record for sale through an online record marketplace. Asking price: $259.
Dust to dust
Even with all the added foot traffic, a trip to ReSOURCE almost always delivers a surprise. Usually that comes in the form of some small delight — snail-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers, for example.
Sometimes, things get weird.
Last year, while shopping at the Burlington store, my partner and I noticed a floral-patterned ginger jar on a shelf. It was still in its original box and priced at less than $10. Score!
My partner pulled the box from the shelf, opened it and removed the lid from the jar. Inside, we discovered a plastic bag filled with ashes. A taped label read, simply, “Ralph.”
We took “Ralph” — what was left of him, anyway — to the cashier, who was horrified and apologetic. She placed the jar behind the counter.
I wondered how Ralph ended up on the sales floor and figured someone in the sorting room, probably wading through a donation “mountain,” hadn’t thought to check inside the jar.
Other questions followed close behind. Did the donor forget to look, too? How long did Ralph sit in someone’s garage or basement before his beloveds forgot where they’d placed him? Was Ralph a person or a pet?
One lesson, it would seem, is that in the thrifting biz, you never know what, or who, will come to rest there.
Not long ago, the Williston ReSOURCE received a high-end urn for human remains in its donation bay. According to employees, the name of said human was still printed on the bottom. (There was some dispute as to whether the ashes had been fully removed before drop-off). Staffers placed the urn — which normally sells new for more than $500 — in one of the glass cases by the register.
Some customers became upset, and ReSOURCE pulled it from the floor.
A perfectly good urn.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Thrifty Business | ReSOURCE’s growing reuse empire looks a lot like Vermont”
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2025.
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