There was a time when "used" was a word retailers tried to soften. Secondhand meant thrift stores, hand-me-downs, garage sales and making do. If you could afford new, the assumption was that new was what you wanted.
That hierarchy is getting harder to recognize.
A new study from The Consumer Collective found that 76% of U.S. shoppers bought something secondhand in the past 12 months, while 89% have bought used at some point. Forty-four percent said they are buying more secondhand goods than they did two years ago, a number that jumps to 66% among Gen Z.
The generational split is even clearer when looking at recent purchases. Millennials led the survey, with 89% saying they bought secondhand in the past year, followed by Gen Z at 85%. Among shoppers age 62 and older, the figure was 59%. The report is based on an August 2026 survey of 400 U.S. shoppers.
Those numbers suggest secondhand is no longer a side market populated mainly by bargain hunters. It is becoming a normal part of how people shop. And once something becomes normal, the social meaning around it can change quickly.
The most revealing part of the study may be luxury resale. Nearly half of respondents - 49% - said they already buy luxury goods secondhand or would consider doing so. Among Gen Z, that figure is 61%; among Millennials, 60%. For shoppers 62 and older, it drops to 27%.
That is a major reversal in what ownership can signal. A used designer bag once risked looking like the substitute for the new one someone really wanted. Now the exact same purchase can be framed as smart, curated, sustainable, rare or simply more interesting than walking into a store and buying what everyone else can buy.
In other words, secondhand has not necessarily escaped status competition. It may have created a new version of it.
The flex is no longer always that something is new. Sometimes the flex is that you found it. You recognized it. You knew what it was worth. You got the discontinued color, the vintage jacket, the older piece with a better reputation, or the luxury item at a price that made the buyer feel smarter than the person who paid retail.
None of that means economics have stopped mattering. Secondhand remains a practical way to stretch a budget, and resale becomes more attractive when new products feel overpriced. But the cultural shift is that affordability no longer has to be the whole story - or even the story a buyer tells about the purchase.
The Consumer Collective's value findings reinforce that point. Only 11% of respondents said brand-new products offer better value. Thirty-four percent said secondhand offers better value, while half said the answer depends on the category. That is a very different consumer mindset from one built around the assumption that new automatically means superior.
Clothing is still the gateway. Seventy-one percent of secondhand shoppers said they have bought used clothing. But the study found interest extending into furniture, electronics and books, suggesting the behavior is moving beyond closets and into the rest of the home.
There is also something notably old-fashioned about how people prefer to do it. Despite the enormous growth of resale platforms, 54% of respondents said they prefer buying secondhand in a physical store. Only 18% prefer online shopping, while 28% like both equally. Thrift stores remain the single most popular destination.
That matters because secondhand shopping is not always just a transaction. The hunt is part of the product. A conventional retailer is designed to reduce uncertainty: the same item, the same sizes, the same display, the same replenishment. A thrift store offers the opposite. You do not know what will be there, and the possibility of finding something unusually good is part of why you walk in.
Luxury resale pushes that psychology even further. The Consumer Collective found that condition and authenticity are the biggest concerns for shoppers considering used luxury goods. That is the tradeoff built into the category: the potential reward is a better price, a harder-to-find item or a more distinctive purchase, but the buyer also has to know enough to trust what they are getting.
That knowledge can become status of its own. The shopper who once might have been judged for buying used can now be admired for knowing where to look, what to look for and when something is actually worth buying.
The vocabulary has changed along with the behavior. "Used" competes with "vintage," "pre-owned," "resale," "archival" and "pre-loved." Those words are not interchangeable, but they all help separate today's secondhand market from the old idea that the buyer is simply settling for something another person no longer wanted.
For retailers, that shift is not just cultural trivia. It means a secondhand purchase can compete directly with a new one for the same customer and the same discretionary dollar. The Consumer Collective argues that brands treating resale as a side market risk missing where their customers already shop.
The bigger question is what happens when secondhand becomes fully mainstream. Part of its appeal has always come from finding what everyone else missed. If every major brand builds a resale channel and every shopper becomes a treasure hunter, the market may become more polished, more expensive and more status-conscious in the process.
That would be a fitting endpoint for the cultural reversal. Buying someone else's stuff used to carry a stigma because it suggested you could not buy new. Increasingly, the status may come from proving you did not need to.
Source & methodology
The Consumer Collective, “Second Nature: The State of Secondhand Shopping in America.” The company says the report is based on an August 2026 national study of 400 U.S. shoppers. Official release | Consumer Collective insights page
The Consumer Collective, “Second Nature: The State of Secondhand Shopping in America.” The company says the report is based on an August 2026 national study of 400 U.S. shoppers. Official release | Consumer Collective insights page