Is Everyone Actually Finding Designer Bags at Thrift Stores?

I'm sorry but I don't believe it

Yesterday, I was engaged in the mundane task of deleting photos from my camera roll. I’m the kind of person who is constantly screenshotting the bizarre things I see online and as a result, my photo library is more clogged than Bill Clinton’s arteries. I went to get a mental health pedicure because I’ve been feeling more insane than usual lately (I don’t think I’m alone in this one, watching the news cycle in January felt like being exposed to advanced psychological torture) and, in need of something to concentrate on while the salon worker filed down my craggy feet, I attempted to restore some sense of orderliness to my chaotic camera roll.

I managed to get as far back as April 2025, and what surprised me about the exercise is how frequently the same things come up again and again. I try to document patterns whenever I see them and one phenomenon I found overrepresented in my photo library is screenshots of people finding designer bags at the thrift store.

Most of the videos follow a standard pattern: the camera scans a cluster of tangled purses on a disorganized rack. A disembodied hand grabs something from the cluster and the video zooms in to reveal a telltale logo or recognizable pattern. Then a person enters the frame, hand clasped over their mouth in disbelief, seemingly speechless over this fluke of fortune. To give you a sense of how often I’m seeing these videos, here’s a smattering of screenshots I’ve collected.

Something doesn’t quite add up. I’ve been an avid thrifter for the last 20 years and this just…doesn’t happen. Designer clothing? Sure. It’s plausible enough that someone might find a designer item sprinkled amongst the racks of highly flammable Fashion Nova and Shein garments. In the early 2000s, I remember vintage Ferragamo shoes were a common sight. I’ve come across designer clothes while thrifting as recently as last year. But designer purses? Absolutely not. Some fakes, sure, but nothing that comes even close to passing the authenticity sniff test. I’ve seen beat-up vintage Coach bags turn up on occasion, but those bags are somewhat common and relatively inexpensive as far as designer bags go. Let’s be real, you are not thrifting a $4000 vintage Chanel or a Bottega Venetta bag that’s under 10 years old.

Related:

First of all, people don’t donate designer purses to thrift stores. They hand them down to their kids, other family members or trusted friends. Even someone liquidating the estate of a dead relative is likely to have some inkling of their value, and either hang on to them or choose to sell them through more reputable designer consignment shops.

Let’s say a designer bag did actually make its way onto the floor of your local Sally Ann’s. Presumably the staff would notice the quality or label, and put it behind the glass counter with the rest of the jewelry and valuables. I’ve seen Doc Marten’s placed in the valuables section before. It’s difficult for me to believe that a person working at a thrift store would clock Doc Marten’s as high value and not a Fendi purse. (My friend Liz did actually find a Fendi purse at the valuable counter of a Salvation Army but it was priced a lot higher than $19.99.)

There are three possible options here: either the bags are fake, people are planting designer bags at thrift stores for the purposes of making viral content, or the bags are actually real and I’m just a skeptical asshole.

I feel guilty for being so suspicious of my fellow thrifters, but the knowledge that content creation is basically the only profession normal people can go into and strike it rich these days means there is a strong incentive for people to create engagement bait and manipulate the algorithm with it. (Based on the sheer number of designer bags this one particular guy has thrifted, there’s basically no other explanation. He’s also from Toronto, so I KNOW he’s lying. The thrift stores here are not that great, my guy!)

What grates on me the most about these videos is 1) the feigned sense of disbelief and 2) the immediate assumption of value without further interrogation. It’s always, “Wow, I found this designer bag” and not “Wow, this appears to be a designer bag. I’m going to do more research and figure out if it’s genuine or not.” If someone finds what appears to be a designer bag and questions the veracity, that makes for a compelling story. But if someone isn’t even posing the question, I find them automatically suspect. I think every single one of these videos should require a Part 2 follow-up where they tell us the exact name of the bag and how much an authenticator has determined it’s worth. (Yes, I am suggesting that social media should be fact checked, something will literally never happen.)

It’s entirely possible that this phenomenon isn’t happening as frequently as I think. The algorithm starts off showing you a trickle, then when it notices how highly engaged you are, it turns the faucet on and suddenly you’re inundated. There’s an irresistible vicariousness to the “unlikely thrift find” genre of content. It’s designed to make me feel a sense of hope; if I head to the thrift store, a precious treasure might just be waiting for me there.

If I were writing an investigative version of this story, here’s what I would do. I would reach out to every single person I’ve seen who has posted a Reel or TikTok in this genre and compile data on where they’re located, and which store the bag came from to create a visual map that records where and how often these sightings happen. I’d also ask how often they go thrifting and enlist a math genius to help me come up with some sort of formula quantifying the statistical likelihood of this happening. I also just want to ask these people what was going though their mind when they first spotted the bag, and whether or not they’ve done any research into its authenticity.

Whether the authenticity of the bag actually matters is an entirely different thing, but I’ll just leave this here.