Day 18: Ethics of Reselling
Key Questions
Listen to (or read) the discussion on ethics of reselling, pick one theme, and and reflect on how it could play out through in your fiction.
Our next prompt is about ethics, a key component of feminist economics frameworks. As we develop our fiction/speculation further, let’s connect our personal experiences as resellers with the fiction’s potential to reflect them. Pick some of the issues closest to your interest and experience from the list below (or any other ethical issues that have come up in your experience as a reseller), and incorporate them to your fiction.
There is a widespread sense of reselling being ‘unethical’. This has come up mainly on social media, with influencers and anonymous redditors questioning the ethics of resale. Beyond evident situations where reselling is unethical, such as hoarding essential goods to hike up prices, as was the case with formula, the reasons for calling resale unethical are a little more elusive and less rational. Even in the case of baby formula, the reason for scarcity was the monopoly of formula production by a few companies (encouraged by the state), rather than resellers directly. Resellers hiking up formula prices were peers of consumers that made the problem worse. Let’s unpack some of these issues together.
Some of the ‘reseller haters’ argue that resellers ‘take from the poor,’ grabbing the best and most valuable items for resale and their own profit, keeping them from end users, in this case, ‘the poor’ who would shop at thrift stores. Others see reselling, the act of buying and flipping, as not enough of a ‘job’ and therefore not deserving of financial compensation. Others dislike the behaviors of resellers at thrift stores.
Jennifer LeZotte's work provides an insightful lens into these ethical debates, particularly through her exploration of the commodification of vintage clothing. She highlights how the rebranding of secondhand goods as "vintage" or "trendy" can obscure their original contexts and elevate their value in affluent markets. This process often disconnects the items from their historical and cultural significance, reducing them to mere commodities (University of North Carolina Press) (Mustang News). LeZotte also discusses the potential of the vintage market to offer unique cultural expressions and to challenge mainstream consumer culture. By turning to vintage and secondhand goods, consumers can resist the uniformity and disposability of fast fashion, thereby fostering a more sustainable and personalized approach to consumption (University of North Carolina Press). What LeZotte ‘s work tells us about reselling and ethics is that reselling has been a kind of economic activity in the US for a long time, but its significance and cultural shape has evolved. Moreover, she shows how the labor of selling used consumer goods has been already negatively perceived in the past. While aknowledging the role of resellers in these cultural and economic shifts, she urges people against the stigmatization of resellers, and rather urges people to focus on the role of larger corporations in secondhand.
Another ethical aspect of reselling is the systemic perpetuation of overconsumption. We discussed this already last week when talking about the ways secondhand can replicate rather than mitigate capitalist urges. Secondhand overconsumption may encourage people upstream to consume more, as they perceive that their donated things are being reused. This just constributes to the current massive consumer waste. In this view the practice of reselling can perpetuate the capitalist cycle of consumption rather than mitigating it.
At a systemic level, there’s an additional question here, and it regards not only reselling but thrifting at large: if the best items get recirculated within rich countries like the U.S., would that mean that the ‘end road’ of the international secondhand industry would receive less and less quality items? If the best items often remain within the U.S., lower-quality items will flood international secondhand markets, leaving less and less use and exchange value in the items down the stream. This is associated to the larger global structures of inequality, but how could resellers be involved in changing these?
Additionally, racial and gender dynamics in reselling are deeply intertwined with class and geographical factors. This intersectionality can affect who participates in reselling and who benefits from it, highlighting disparities in access and opportunity.
Finally, there are ethical issues when thinking about the use of virtual assistants and AI, especially when secondhand economies in the States become more and more dependent on the labor of outsourced data workers in countries like the Philippines and India. This issue, while not exclusive by any means to the secondhand sector, still complicates the questions about secondhand being a more ethical option compared to regular fast fashion retail.