What motivates you? Help out with some research!

[brittanywhere]

Hello everyone! My name's Brittany and I hail from the bustling town of Columbia, Missouri. Fortunately for me, although the town is small, it has tons of options for second-hand shopping, which I started doing in college due to the typical financial limitations of the always-glamorous college lifestyle. But lately I've found myself doing it for completely non-economic reasons... So my question is, what motivates you to shop second-hand?

At school, I'm minoring in anthropology and decided to base my semester anthro project on second-hand shoppers. I've been doing research on the subject most of the semester and have a final survey that I'm trying to get a lot of diversified number of respondents to take. If you're interested in helping me out with this I would appreciated it so much!!

This link is: http://bit.ly/lKPOFz

Happy thrifting!

[FleaQueen]

My primary thrifting reason is to find stuff to resell.

My secondary reason is to find stuff for myself that is a) priced way less than what things cost at the mall, and b) that is maybe a little unique. 

I went from turning my nose up to secondhand clothes to having a wardrobe that is at least 85% secondhand. 

www.fullservicebohemian.blogspot.com

[Big Daddy Audio]

Did the survey and like to find things that are useful to me.  Of course, sometimes I find things which I know I will flip, based on known markets and prices out-the-door.

I also IMPROVE on the stereo systems I have, but as of right now, I'd have to find some darn good stuff to improve upon what I currently have.  I'm not trying to toot my own horn here, but what I'm saying is that once you get up in the Adcom and Luxman areas, you're kind of at a theoretical limit of what you're going to find which will be an improvement.  I guess it could happen, but it's highly unlikely.

I will offer any and all advice as best I can, based on the information you give.  I, for one, feel that MANY good components are donated, based on the largely false assumption that a "New" system will be a "Better" system.  Like Skip has pointed out in a separate thread, the older stuff DOES sound better.

[brianrhc]

I did the survey and hope you'll post results when done. My primary reason is to find items at good prices for my wife's or my art collections, but also occasionally to buy clothes or household items. I also look for art for re-sale profit. My secondary reasons are to re-use items (pro-environment, anti-consumerism), to get into treasure-hunting zen, and to help the store charity. 

[brittanywhere]

Thank you all so much for not only taking the time to fill out the survey but also leaving such helpful feedback. I appreciate it so much. I've been overwhelmed by the amount of feedback generated by this and another similar forum. This is such a wonderful community!

Hopefully as soon as I finish with this survey/paper/presentation and semester I can post here some general findings that may be of interest to some of you.

Again, thank you!

[akbjr]

Hi, I did the survey, whcih was fun, & my big thing to thrift shop for is books. I sort of hoard them, I gues, but I can't quit. I live near the lowest priced thrift store for books in my city, & don't have a car, so it's very handy when I want to do some book shopping. I know what days the volunteer "book lady" puts the "new" books out & like to try to get there when she is there stocking shelves. I don't resell, but I do trade them at local used book stores for credit which is nice, plus having a lot for my own reading & also to give away to people. I used to occasionally buy a new book at Costco or some place where they were discounted, & now I can't imagine even doing that. I've found books lately that I've seen new not so long ago.All you have to do is be willing to wait a while & almost any new bestseller you want to read & own will show up at the thrifts.

[Tammy]

I also took the survey.  My husband began to wonder if something was wrong with me answering everything in the highly agree catagory.   

[brittanywhere]

Survey is now closed, analyses have been run, paper is complete! A big THANK YOU to everyone who took the time to participate!

Out of 66 total responses (awesome!!) I was able to generate tons of data!

The five sets of questions aimed to measure five broad motivations: second-hand shopping as a form of entertainment or fun, uniqueness of items available, bargain hunting, history of times available, and reuse/anti-consumerism. A person could "strongly agree," which was coded as a 5, "agree" which was coded as a 4, all the way down to "strongly disagree," which was coded as a 1.

Of the motivations measured, the statements regarding bargain hunting had the highest mean values (which averaged out to 4.406 where 5 is the highest level), which makes hunting for bargains the most motivating factor! The motivation of reusing old items rather than buying something new came in right behind it with a mean of 4.318. Third place went to fun/entertainment with a mean of 4.27. Then uniqueness of items offered at second-hand stores had a mean of 4.03, followed by historical value of items with a mean of 3.85. But overall all the factors were found to be highly motivational.

I also compared the motivation-based question sets’ answer totals to one another to identify how correlated motivations are among respondents. Most of the motivations were found to be correlated with one another, indicating that when a person is motivated by one of the factors, another of the factors also motivates them. Rather than discussing the many positively correlated motivational factors, I will instead discuss the factors that were found to be relatively independent of each other. In other words, they did not often occur in the same person.

The motivation of entertainment/fun-seeking and social motivation of anti-consumerism/reuse were not found to be significantly correlated.  One hypothesis for this low correlation might be that those who shop second-hand for social reasons do not do so for the fun involved in the process. Instead they shop second-hand for the necessities and do not enjoy the actual act of consuming. For these socially-minded consumers, the act of second-hand shopping is simply the most practical way of achieving their goal of reuse, recycling, or maintaining a low impact on the environment.

The motivations of bargain hunting and historical interest were found to be correlated, but to a very small degree. Only at the .05 level of significance were they found to be correlated at all. I hypothesize that the reason behind this may be that bargain hunters often are looking for new, modern items that are currently in fashion and for sale in retail stores.  They are interested in finding items relevant to current trends at a low price. I also think that those who look for historical pieces are less price-conscious because they are sometimes collectors, who will spend whatever necessary in order to add an item to their collection, or because they know that items from decades in the past have a higher price-point than more recent second-hand items because of their rarity.

Next I sought to determine whether or not motivations varied among two demographic categories: gender and, separately, political affiliation.  I first compared the means of each question set total with the respondents’ genders to see if different genders were motivated by different things. I was surprised to find that none of the motivational factors were different among men and women. The largest difference in the means of responses from females and responses from males was related to the first motivational factor of shopping second-hand for fun or entertainment. However, this difference among female and male respondents was not found to be statistically significant.

Next I looked at how motivational factors might vary among political affiliations. I classified political affiliations into four groups: liberal, conservative, moderate, or indifferent/apathetic. I compared the means of responses on each motivation-based question set from the different political groups and again found no statistically significant differences.  In other words, people of different political affiliations have very similar motivations to second-hand shop.


Again, thank you all so much for your input and participation!