In the two decades that I’ve written about waste and recycling, it’s rare that I’ve gone through a week without somebody saying to me that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It happens at American garage sales; it happens at the flea market beneath my home in Malaysia. It happened in Cotonou, the commercial capital of the West African nation of Benin. One afternoon I asked a used-shoe trader in the city’s Dantokpa Market how he sources his nearly new plus-size Nikes. He replied with a toothy smile. “Trash is treasure.”
Like many aphorisms, there’s some truth there. But in my experience, not much. Generally, one man’s trash is another man’s trash. And as the world of stuff expands, the trash is becoming more common. Yet treasure continues to receive attention well beyond its representation in the world’s used stuff. Walk into any bookstore and there’s bound to be several guides to the price of collectibles sitting on the shelves (good luck finding a book on how to sell and price your old forks and ten-year-old acrylic sweaters). Flip through American television channels most any night of the week and you’re bound to land on a show in which a casual junk picker happens upon an autographed baseball worth many times the sum paid for it.
That small percentage matters, though. In some cases, that little bit of treasure is what makes it possible for a secondhand business or charity to take all the stuff that doesn’t have much value. Knowing the difference helps us understand how and why we come to value stuff, and how so much turns to garbage.
My grandparents lived in a split-level home in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, roughly a half mile from Highway 169. During my first five years, I lived around the corner on Quebec Avenue South, and I recall running between houses to reach their front door, where, without fail, I’d be greeted by my grandmother Betty. She’d usually bring me upstairs to the living room and kitchen. But if I had my choice, we’d slip down the creaking wooden steps to the basement.
It was filled with stuff, most of it “good stuff,” as my grandmother called it. There were two large, heavy wooden china cabinets in the far corners (one had belonged to her mother, I believe), a wooden drop-front desk on the near wall (“I’m saving that for you,” she’d say), antique lamp stands, a pharmacist cabinet (“that’s also yours one day”), and tables covered in knickknacks, including U.S. presidential campaign buttons (IF I WERE 21, I’D VOTE FOR KENNEDY), vases, candlestick holders, postcards, bits of art glass, and random photos. A photo of Abraham Lincoln hung on one wall, a reproduced Napoleon portrait on another, and a framed coin collection near the stairs, with a random assortment of other images—mostly landscapes—scattered throughout.
If you were lucky enough to be invited into the basement—and not everybody was—she’d likely dig into the assortment of objects with the same curiosity as you, the first-time visitor. And if you picked up something—say, an antique iron—and asked where she’d found it, the answer was almost always the same: “That was so long ago. Probably a sale.”
My grandmother’s passion for collecting had immigrant roots. Her father, Abe Leder, arrived in the United States from Russia with nothing—no education, English, or transferable skills. So he did what millions of other Russian Jews did: he became a ragpicker, roaming Galveston, Texas, for discarded objects that could be sold. At first, he searched for discarded clothes, bedsheets, and other garments. But in time, he had enough capital to acquire metals, paper, and—eventually—“antiques” and collectibles. The underlying principle was always the same, no matter whether he was buying a pile of scrapped brass plumbing fixtures or an oak cabinet: the person selling didn’t know the true value of an object, and Abe Leder either did … or thought he did.
The five Leder children—my grandmother was the middle one—all worked in the family recycling business at some point during their lives. And they all, to some degree, became collectors, holding on to objects in part because they acquired them for much less than what they believed they were worth. For people and families with living memories of immigration, of the Great Depression, bargains create a sense of security and identity.
As I described in my first book, Junkyard Planet, some of my earliest memories entail walking through the family scrap-metal warehouse, perusing inventory with my father. It was filled with value buys: metal cuttings from area manufacturers, scrap car radiators from repair shops, bundles of wire sold by electricians. If I returned a day or two later, all that inventory would be gone, sold onward to someone who paid more.
I have an additional set of early-childhood memories.
It’s before dawn and I’m riding in the passenger seat of my grandmother’s long, powder-blue sedan. We stop in front of a single-story suburban house, shut off the headlights, and wait. The talk-radio station is playing softly, and the newspaper classified pages whisper as my grandmother peruses them for nearby garage sales. When the garage door opens, she closes the paper, and we walk up the driveway, tailed by other early arrivers hoping to get first crack at the sale. I remember plates covered in brooches filled with rubylike stones, and my grandmother negotiating as the others leaned in to see what they might be missing. We always left with some “good stuff.”
That was the mid-1970s, and the American garage sale was a preschooler, too. According to the historian Susan Strasser, author of Waste and Want, a landmark history of American waste, the term “garage sale” fully emerged in 1967, “when people made a verbal distinction between rummage sales for charity and garage or yard sales for profit.” The charity sale emerged in the early part of the twentieth century, as affluent Americans found that mass production had blessed them with more stuff than they needed. They donated that excess to churches and other charitable organizations, which, in turn, sold them to fund charitable works. My grandmother spent years running a thrift shop that benefited the National Council of Jewish Women, all the while attending garage sales for her own enjoyment and profit. There were plenty to attend: according to Strasser, by 1981 Americans were holding six million per year.
The reasons for attending a garage sale in the 1960s and ’70s varied. The American counterculture that emerged in the 1950s inspired a wave of anti-materialist environmentalism among young Americans, and some viewed the garage sale as a way to bypass the consumer economy altogether. Others saw vintage goods as a means of connecting with a simpler, less-materialistic past. And many others viewed the garage sale as a more interesting and diverse shopping experience than the uniform retailing found in America’s booming midcentury shopping malls and department stores. For individuals whose self-image is located outside what they perceive to be mainstream American culture, garage sales are a toolbox for assembling a countercultural identity—albeit one that also must be purchased from mass-market stuff.
As young rebels grew into affluent baby boomers, garage-saling and thrifting went upmarket. In 1997, the American public broadcaster PBS began airing Antiques Roadshow, a weekly broadcast based on a BBC show. In it, collectors bring their antiques for experts to appraise, in hope of finding out they possess a treasure. The show has been a wild success, and it’s inspired imitators in the form of second- and third-generation treasure-hunt series like American Pickers.
My grandmother enjoyed those television shows. When Antiques Roadshow visited Minneapolis, she was eager to attend and even brought along a vase for appraisal. But when offered the chance to appear on camera, she declined, saying she “didn’t need the attention.” By the late 1990s, she was mostly out of the garage-saling game, anyway. She had better sources for stuff, including my father’s scrapyard, which she plumbed for brass vases and other metal objects that struck her as having value beyond the metal. But she also decided that the “good stuff” we used to buy as dawn broke was no longer around or cheap. Too many antique dealers were chasing it, she said, and there was far less to be had. “It’s not like it used to be.”
Main Street in Stillwater, Minnesota, runs parallel to the St. Croix River and between a handsome collection of two- and three-story brick buildings erected between 1860 and the early twentieth century. Many were built by the lumber businesses that once thrived in the area, supplying wood to communities around the Midwest, including Minneapolis, thirty-five miles away. Others housed a once-thriving manufacturing base that took advantage of the St. Croix’s nearby connection to the Mississippi.
Nothing lasts forever, especially economies dependent on limited natural resources. Sure enough, the trees ran out, and the manufacturing was priced out. In their place, antique shops moved into the elegant old brick buildings, taking advantage of (then) low rents and property prices, and a vast inventory of antiques that could be found in the small towns of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. This new business grew. By the early 1990s, Stillwater was home to around thirty antique shops, many of which sold items likely made in or around Stillwater during its heyday. For residents of the nearby Twin Cities, the town’s antique stores became a favorite daytrip.
But antique stores, too, seem to have had their day: just six antique businesses remain in Stillwater. The decline isn’t confined to the banks of the St. Croix. The population of Minnesota antique shops overall has declined by roughly 20 percent over the past twenty years. And that reflects a global trend. Antiques Roadshow now runs reappraisals of antiques featured on earlier episodes, and they’re typically in a downward direction. David Lackey, an appraiser made famous by Antiques Roadshow, claims that the prices of traditional American and British furniture—once antique-store mainstays—have fallen by 50 to 75 percent in recent years.1 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.
On the south end of Main Street, not far from where the tourist traffic enters town, is a husky three-story building that originally housed a furniture store and, later, a funeral home. In 1991, an antique business located across the street acquired the structure and transformed it into the Midtown Antique Mall, allegedly the largest antique emporium for hundreds of miles in all directions.
The brick exterior is unremarkable for Stillwater, but walk through the glass doors and you’ll find a towering two-story room with a balcony hung with dated landscape paintings, old advertisements, a set of Japanese silk prints, and several clocks. Below is a tangle of cabinets and tables displaying the full range of things that somebody found valuable enough to extract from the jumble of worthless items filling up a home, a business, a church. There is china; there is art glass; there are advertising signs; there is jewelry.
In the 1990s, small, independent antique shops began to fold and dealers relocated into large antique malls. Midtown Antiques in Stillwater, Minnesota, is likely the largest in the Upper Midwest.
Most days, Dick Richter, a wispy antique dealer in his seventies, presides. He has an expressive face framed by a wild head of white hair and an equally scraggly beard. “We have one and a half million items in here,” he tells me as he leads me past the cash register and into the mall, where he’s sold since the early 1990s. “And I challenge anyone to say otherwise.” Dick isn’t the owner—that’s Julie, who’s presiding over the cash register. But his possessiveness is palpable. It reminds me of the affection you find in priests when they show visitors around their parish churches.
As Dick lopes up a stairway, he explains that the concept behind an antique mall isn’t much different from the one behind a housing co-op. At Midtown, dealers pay rent, plus 2 percent of every transaction, and are required to spend a certain amount of time each month working the floor and cash register. In return, Midtown pays for the lights, heat, security, and marketing; collects the sales tax; and pays the credit card fees. It’s a model that emerged in the 1990s as small, independent antique shops started closing in the face of a growing excess of “antiques” and dealers to sell them. Competition and shrinking margins forced those who had stuff to move into common quarters.
It’s not easy to manage an antique mall. Politics between dealers, especially those with similar collecting interests, can be fierce. “I’ll tell you about it—off-record,” Dick says, shaking his head as he leads me quickly past a wash of children’s books, vintage dresses, racks of old Life magazines, china, and glass. He turns into a booth lined on both sides by Star Wars action figures, Austin Powers action figures, and Star Trek action figures. “Twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have allowed this,” he says. “Now? People want what reminds them of what they grew up with. It’s out of production, so we allow it. Not my thing, but gotta move with the times.” He moves along, past cabinets of antique glass and jewelry, racks of vintage clothing, and stops at a cabinet full of antique cups and saucers.
“So what’s your thing?” I ask.
“These days, stained glass. But my wife and I, we used to do a lot of furniture and dolls.”
I gaze at the cups and saucers. “My grandmother collected cups,” I say to him, lingering on the memory of the display rack she arranged just outside her kitchen.
“Nobody wants them, anymore. Sorry. Twenty years ago, we could get twenty to forty bucks for a cup. Now?” He points at a small sign: 50% OFF. He walks to the balcony and points downstairs at the front window. “See down there? That’s Pyrex,” he says, referring to a table covered in patterned casserole dishes, mixing bowls, and other pieces of durable glassware. Pieces manufactured for sale in the 1950s and 1960s have become highly collectible, especially by younger Americans, and can sell for thousands of dollars. “A year ago, that was Victorian glass in the window.”
I almost interject that my grandmother loved Victorian glass. But he knows that. “The people who bought the Victorian just aren’t around anymore. Tastes change. People want what they grew up with.”
“I grew up with Pyrex,” I tell him, remembering my mother’s brown mixing bowls. “And I don’t want it, especially for that price.”
“Maybe not,” he says. “But, believe me, we get people who do.”
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.
Though nobody could have foreseen it at the dawn of the industrial revolution, mass production democratized collecting and connoisseurship. By the mid-twentieth century, everyone could own something valuable and—in some sense—rare.
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.
“What’s going to have value in twenty years?”
“The oak furniture that isn’t selling now? We cleared Michigan’s forests to make that stuff, and now it’s on the third floor,” he says, referring to Midtown’s furniture showroom. “Beats the hell out of me.”
Dick introduces me to Judi Gerber, a mall tenant with decades of experience buying and selling collectibles in the American Midwest. Years ago, she used to attend farm-foreclosure auctions on a regular basis. “The farms didn’t have dishwashers—and all the glass that’s ruined by dishwashers,” she explains. “And that good glass was very sellable.” Better yet, nobody in a small town wanted those glasses, and there weren’t many antique dealers competing for them. “So I could get five boxes for ten dollars, and inside there’d be a goblet that I’d sell for forty dollars.”
These days, the stuff being sold out of country farmhouses isn’t much different from the stuff found in suburban Minneapolis houses. Thanks to the development of the mass market, suburbanites and farmers have been buying the same stuff for decades.
“Stuff from the seventies, I thought it was popular now,” I say to Linda Hemberger, another Midtown dealer with decades of experience, who’s seated next to Gerber. “Age doesn’t matter?”
She cackles. “Oh, my dear. We have people come into the shop with boxes of stuff they feel is worth a lot because it was Grandma’s or it’s a hundred years old. We have to tell them, ‘That china pattern, it was included in a sack of horse feed as an incentive to get people to buy the horse feed.’ If you had nothing, it was something. To millions of people.”
“And now?”
“Good, not so good, great?”
Dick Richter and I slip between racks of vintage clothing and take a stairway to the third floor. The light is scarce and tinted brown, reflected off the vast expanse of wooden furniture that fills the space. There must be three hundred china cabinets, wardrobes, chairs, and tables, at least. We walk the perimeter, the aged wooden floor creaking beneath us.
Among the reasons that antique furniture isn’t selling in the volumes or at the prices it once did: home ownership among young Americans is in decline, and few if any renters want a several-hundred-pound wardrobe that they’ll have to move from studio apartment to studio apartment. Likewise, the advent of glass-clad apartment towers and their floor-to-ceiling windows has transformed home decorating, especially for high-end customers who once coveted big brown wooden pieces. Minimalist, modern designs often work best in those spaces—not Victorian cabinets designed to dominate a wall.
But the most important factor might be demographic: the people who treasured that big brown furniture are now downsizing and dying, leaving behind an excess of the stuff. If a young person wants a large Victorian wardrobe, it’s available for free in Grandma’s basement, or someone else’s grandma’s basement.
“Let’s be real,” Richter says as he waves his hand over the hundreds of third-floor pieces. “Nobody wants a fine oak dining room set anymore. And there are so many, and you can’t get rid of them.”
Nearby stands Dale Kenney, a hulking eighty-year-old furniture dealer. He greets us with a scowl. “I’m getting out of it,” he declares as he weakly shakes my hand. Kenney is a former Northwest Airlines mechanic who got into the antique business gradually, after his mother gave him some furniture to sell several decades ago. When Northwest’s mechanics went on strike, he started devoting more time to the business. “We’ve been in it so long, I’m buying stuff back from twenty, twenty-five years ago. People are getting old.” He points to an elegant wooden shaving stand. “That piece. Used to get two twenty-five for a shaving stand. Now it’s just clutter. And nobody wants a drop-front desk anymore because it can’t hold a computer.”
I wander around his inventory. Solid oak tables that once might have been treasured and passed on as a store of a family’s wealth are marked below the price of a new iPhone. Laid across one of Kenney’s oak chairs is a beat-up and dusty vinyl shoulder bag with a Northwest Orient Airlines logo printed across it. After World War II, Northwest Orient pioneered the business of flying between the United States and Asia. When I moved to China in 2002, I flew Northwest Airlines (it dropped “Orient” in 1986), and since then I’ve flown it and Delta Airlines (which acquired Northwest in 2008) hundreds of times over the Pacific. Over time I’ve developed a hobby interest in an earlier, arguably more luxurious era of trans-Pacific travel. The beat-up bag is marked at thirty dollars. “I’ll take this,” I tell Dale. “Do I pay downstairs?”
Nine thousand miles away, Azalina Zakaria stands beside three card tables in the murky lower level of the Amcorp Mall in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Wearing a red headscarf and loose black clothes, she stands with her hands crossed as she watches customers walk from booth to booth, enjoying the weekend flea market, Malaysia’s best and biggest. Her tables are a hodgepodge of die-cast toy cars, old black-and-white snapshots and postcards, plates, cups, steel bowls, a typewriter, old coffee cans, and a plastic Mickey Mouse figurine.
As my four-year-old son examines her die-cast cars, I pick through a stack of old snapshots that appear to have been taken decades ago. Mostly, they depict a single six-member family in a rural setting. In one image, they stand tightly together in front of a small house with rubber trees in the background. To somebody, somewhere, this image is more than a curiosity. It’s family history. “Where do you find these?” I ask her.
“My husband and I travel around Malaysia. We’ll go to old neighborhoods in Johor, Segamat, all kinds of places, and knock on the doors and ask if they have anything to sell. We have a shop in Old Town,” she says, referring to the crowded old Petaling Jaya town center, a few miles from the Kuala Lumpur border. “We keep most of our furniture there.”
That grabs my attention. In addition to the small furniture vendors who bring their heavy pieces, weekly, to the flea market, the lower level of Amcorp Mall is home to two shops specializing in antique wooden furniture. The bigger of the two pushes its best pieces to the front of the store for the weekend. Today those pieces include several wooden dressers, vanities, wardrobes, and pharmacy cabinets, as well as a massive carved bar. I’ve always assumed demand for the pieces is weak, just as it is in Stillwater, but the low rent at Amcorp allows the dealers to rationalize the business. “People are interested in it?”
“They love it,” she says. “That’s why we sell it. The problem is finding it.” She points to a small wooden cabinet holding a gramophone. “I can’t afford to get this in Malaysia. It goes for two thousand to two thousand and five hundred ringgit [$490 to $610].”
“So you get it door-to-door?”
“Cannot. We import. If I buy a shipping container full of old furniture from the U.K., it costs around a thousand ringgit [$245].” She nods across the room at a stack of wooden furniture, anticipating my next question: “Theirs is all imported, too.”
Never did it occur to me that the dim confines of Amcorp Mall’s lower level—home to a supermarket, several small restaurants, and a handful of vinyl record shops—is a hub for globalized secondhand. “How much do you import?”
“As much as I can afford.”
I think of the third floor at Midtown Antiques and its stale oak furniture made from Michigan’s forests. “Do you ever buy American pieces?”
She smiles and shakes her head. “I don’t know anyone.”
I open my phone and show her pictures from the third floor, and her eyes widen.
Two hundred miles away, Kenny Leck leans over a bowl of noodles in one of Singapore’s old shophouses, the colorful, narrow two- and three-story commercial buildings that line the streets in older parts of town. He’s thirty-nine years old and the owner of BooksActually, a small bookshop widely acknowledged to be one of the best in Asia. BooksActually also houses a small antique shop focused on local relics, located in the back of the store.
Kenny is of modest height, with disheveled hair and a face that’s a combination of irritated and happy to see you. It’s sometimes hard to tell one from the other—until you begin chatting with him. Kenny, if he can spare a moment, is endlessly hospitable and a great conversationalist, especially when it comes to his beloved city-state.
“In Singapore, it’s hard to get people to embrace secondhand,” he tells me. Economically, Singapore’s diverse population is dominated by its ethnic Chinese population, of which Kenny counts himself a member. “In Chinese culture, there’s shame if you use secondhand. Means you’re not doing well.” He shakes his head. “Hand-me-downs. At Chinese New Year, it’s all about new clothes.”
It’s a mindset that’s infused Singapore since its bitter separation from Malaysia in 1965. At the time, nobody would’ve expected the small city-state to surpass its far more populous, resource-rich neighbor. But that’s what happened. In the space of just sixty years, it’s gone from a rough tropical backwater port into a global banking and shipping center, a regional hub for multinational corporations, and a research and development center for some of Asia’s most innovative companies. Government is clean and efficient; quality of life is high.
But achieving so much, in so little time, takes its toll. In successful pursuit of an advanced economy, Singapore bulldozed much of its history. Villages disappeared into public housing projects known as HDB flats (for Housing and Development Board), cemeteries became temporary resting places (to make room for the next wave of dead), and the objects and ephemera of a less developed time—everything from obsolete power cords to black-and-white televisions—aren’t just obsolete; they’re symbols of an old-fashioned mindset to overcome.
“I’ve seen so much change in the last twenty years,” Kenny says with a hint of exasperation as we eat lunch in a Chinese restaurant housed in a traditional shophouse. “I remember the dining room table we bought twenty years ago. It lasted for years, until we moved our house and wanted something new.” He lifts a knot of noodles into his mouth. “So much is being thrown away in Singapore now. The other day somebody threw away an Ikea pine side table in our neighborhood. Nice table. I didn’t pick it up because I have no space for it.”
Kenny is not the sort to pass on a perfectly good piece of furniture. “I’m kind of a hoarder,” he admits. “Pencils, rulers, office things, other things. Also bricks.”
“Bricks?”
“Singapore made bricks at one time. They built our country, and they’re everywhere now, propping doors, that kind of thing.” He grows animated. “We made the A1 brick and many others. You can see the brand on the older bricks. But now we import them. I collect the old ones.”
Rarely does a hoarder find practical use for a house full of stuff, much less classic bricks.a But after Kenny opened BooksActually in 2006, he looked around and realized that, even with the books, the space was empty. “So I brought in some of my old stuff,” he says, like antique slide rules, and placed them around the store as decor. Soon, customers were taking an interest. “People would ask if it’s for sale,” he says with a laugh. “They won’t buy a book, but they will buy a wooden ruler.”
Books are a tough business, no matter where the store is located. So when Kenny saw that his young customers were interested in buying pieces of Singapore’s everyday history, he dove into the business of digging up more. Singapore’s government regularly redevelops HDB flats and relocates families to new ones. In the process of the move, much gets left behind.
“So that’s how I started my karang guni work,” Kenny explains, using a local term for a rag-and-bone man who scavenges the waste of others. In Singapore, like elsewhere throughout history, rag-and-bone men are at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Kenny doesn’t care; condemned HDB flats are a museum of the things his city-state once coveted. “It’s a dirty job, digging through trash,” he tells me. “But you wouldn’t believe what I find. Photo albums from the 1920s—why throw those away? I pick them up and sell them.”
Later, as we ride in a taxi past high-end boutiques and hotels, I ask Kenny why anybody in go-go Singapore would care about stuff pulled from low-income HDB flats.
“Nostalgia,” he says. “That’s what makes it work. Lack of history. We only go back to 1965. We just don’t have enough history, so people are looking for a piece. Lately it’s typewriters for hipsters. All driven by nostalgia.” He takes a recent iPhone from his pocket and opens a browser. “Polaroid cameras,” he says as he lands on a Google search page. “Eight, nine years ago, no value. Now they’ll cost you two hundred dollars.” He shows me an image of a compactible Polaroid first manufactured in the 1970s.
“My dad had that model,” I tell him. “I wish I still had it.”
The taxi stops beside a closed-off street jammed with individual vendors of used goods. They sit beneath plastic tarps and restaurant umbrellas with goods spread out before them. I see piles of clothes and shoes, stacks of old DVD players and suitcases, temporary display cases covered with shiny objects, and—here and there—electric teapots on the beat-up boxes in which they were sold years ago. One man has a pile of crutches; another has boxes stacked six feet high and covered in black plastic garbage bags. It looks informal, cheap, a bit dirty—and wholly unlike Singapore.
Kenny pays the fare and leads me slowly up the street. “Years ago, my dad told me that if I lose something, it’ll turn up tomorrow at the Thieves’ Market,” he explains. The people sitting on folding chairs beneath the tents and umbrellas don’t look like thieves. Most are elderly and look no more threatening than the residents of the average elder-care facility in suburban Minneapolis. If anything is being stolen, it’s not by them. Singapore’s Thieves’ Market is now known as the Sungei Road Flea Market. It’s a transit point, the place where things Singaporeans lose, sell, or give away acquire a new owner. “You had garage sales,” Kenny tells me. “We didn’t have garage sales. This is our garage sale.”
As we stroll, a motorcycle slowly maneuvers down the street with two garbage bags of stuff tied to the back. “New inventory,” Kenny says. We stop beside a small table covered in old cellular flip phones. Until recently, many were still usable. But Singapore is phasing out the cell service that they required, and so they’ve become obsolete. The old man in a tank top behind the table pushes an old Motorola at me. “Good one,” he says.
“For what?”
“Collecting.”
Kenny and I continue walking. “Sungei Road used to be twice as big. But the real estate is too expensive.” He points to a newly built subway stop across the street. “In a couple of months this will all be gone.” We pause at two card tables set out beneath a blue tarp. They’re covered in old digital cameras and obsolete flip phones, with a couple of tambourines and bags of children’s books. Among them, Kenny spots a ziplock bag filled with vintage children’s superhero playing cards, which, he says, “will be popular with Gen X types.” He buys five packs for twelve dollars and moves to the next table, where he buys five packs of vintage “school reward pins” for excellent performance in social studies class, glee club, and other events that evoke nostalgia. “The margin is better than books, man!”
We continue strolling. “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.
Later, at BooksActually, Kenny leads me into the area behind the cash registers, where most of his antiques for sale are on display. One wall is covered in glasses and bottles that—due to their shape or brand—invoke nostalgia. A small wooden box is filled with “vintage buttons” priced five for $1.50. Kenny points to a crate filled with cassettes of Indian music made in the 1980s. “When I first started doing karanguni work, I didn’t take cassettes. I mean, who’s going to take these? But I had space, so I started taking them. Now they sell.” He picks up Best of Lata Mangeshkar Vol. 2. “Some of these mean a lot to people.”
He reaches into the box for another one but suddenly notices an unattended customer at the cash register and excuses himself. I watch him slide behind the counter, and then I look beyond him, to the books piled high atop the table in the center of the store and the book-lined walls that seem to lean in toward it. As with the cassettes, some of the titles will mean a lot to people in a future in which screens are even more common. Some might even be rare, and remind people of a Singapore in which BooksActually was a hub for an emerging movement to reclaim the past for the present. But in time what matters from the past will shift, and most of those books, too, will begin to linger in cultural irrelevance, their pages turned and yellowing.
For a moment in the 1990s, the internet seemed poised to make the secondhand economy a respectable and even dominant part of the U.S. economy. Much of the credit goes to eBay, one of the first, and certainly the most successful, of the online auction sites. Founded in September 1995, it grew as rapidly as any business, ever. In 1997, it hosted two million auctions. By the mid-2000s, it enjoyed hundreds of millions of registered users and a multibillion-dollar market capitalization that exceeded so-called old-economy manufacturers of new things like cars. One early researcher into internet addiction claimed that in the late 1990s “online auction addiction” accounted for 15 percent of all internet addiction cases (cybersexual addiction was number one). But folks enticed by rarity and the promise of riches hidden in closets grew bored when the transparency of the internet revealed that things weren’t so rare, after all.
“You had this one piece you thought was really rare,” explains Dick Richter. “At first there was a rise in prices, and then they settled down. And it sucked us down with it.” As the allure of the treasure hunt faded, so too did cases of online-auction addiction. Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, and other forms of entertainment captured more and more of internet users’ screen time.
It turns out that hosting online auctions of commonplace used stuff was no way to grow a stable business. To do that, you need lots of fixed-price products that don’t vary in quality. So eBay has spent the last few years turning away from its past and becoming a fierce seller of new stuff. When I reached out to the company to talk about its role in the global secondhand industry, a spokesperson declined. Doing so, he said, “would probably just reinforce perceptions of eBay as primarily a marketplace for used goods.” These days, the spokesperson wrote to me, “84%+” of eBay’s listings are new and fixed price.
Of course, that’s not close to the end of the online secondhand market. The smartphone has enabled an entirely new generation of services focused on making it easier than ever to sell stuff—and leave eBay in the past. On OfferUp, the leading U.S.-based app for buying and selling stuff, users simply take a picture of what they want to sell and post it. During a phone interview, Nick Huzar, the CEO and co-founder of OfferUp, told me that he came up with the idea of a used-good phone app after noticing that “Goodwill moves so much so fast.”
“Do you compete with Goodwill?”
“Not really. We expand the market.”
“How big is that market?”
“How many stars are in the sky?”
Huzar has no illusions. “Our biggest competitor is time,” he told me. If you have a garage full of stuff—from rakes to Big Wheels—it’s probably not worth the time to photograph and list everything on OfferUp.
But a two-year-old iPhone? That should move immediately. The problem is, from a clutter perspective, the iPhone, the good furniture, and the other “good stuff” is a small percentage of what’s packed into the world’s homes. The economics of decluttering for profit rarely make sense. But the economics of selling new stuff online? According to Huzar, 25 percent of what’s sold on OfferUp is new. Over time, it’ll grow.
a For the record, I am aware of at least one additional brick collector in Singapore. She is in her midtwenties and immersed in the city’s literary and art scene.