Popping Tags at Thriftsburgh

Image courtesy of Laura D'Alessandro on Flickr

This spring, the University of Pitt opened their very own thrift store. Student-run and University-owned, University of Thriftsburgh offers everything from ugly Christmas sweaters to Coach purses, if they’ve been donated of course. Have you been by yet? Stop and donate some old clothes and pick up some new/old clothes. To read the rest of the story head to Pitt News.


Pitt went hip — and opened its own thrift store on campus.

The thrift store, University of Thriftsburgh, is a University-owned, student-run thrift shop focused on sustainability that opened for business yesterday. Located on the first floor of the O’Hara Student Center, the store, is small but brags a wide variety of colorful purses and backpacks as well as racks of shirts, jackets and dresses. Items in the store range in price from $1 to $12, with specialty items being more expensive, according to Maura Kay, one of the store coordinators.

Handmade ugly Christmas sweaters and vintage sports pullovers, for example, will fall within the $3 to $12 range, but the Coach purses ($20) and pair of Jimmy Choo shoes ($90) demand higher prices. Students who donate clothes to the store will get store credit, Kay said. The store only takes Panther Funds and operates Wednesdays from 3 to 8 p.m. and Thursdays and Fridays from 12 to 5 p.m.

By business close on day one, the store had made $538 from 60 purchases. In the biggest sale, a student purchased $64 worth of various clothing items.

All of Thriftsburgh’s initial inventory came from the Give a Thread campaign, a clothing drive meant to recycle unwanted clothes and break the world record for amount of clothes donated. Around five percent of the campaign donations went to the store, according to Thriftsburgh co-founder Anna Greenberg. The campaign collected 111,913 items from December 5 to March 5, falling short of the world record but surpassing its 100,000 articles goal.

Student-run thrift stores are not unique to Pitt. Other colleges across the country feature similar concepts, including the Trunk at Middlebury College in Vermont and the Ole Thrift Shop at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Otterbein University in Ohio also features the Otterbein Thrift Shop, while Clark University in Massachusetts has the Clark Community Thrift Store.

Greenberg said that, although the thrift store is a trendy place to buy cheap clothes, it also serves as a teaching tool about sustainability.