What is the best thrift store in Los Angeles for reselling?

For volume and mispricing, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul at 210 N Avenue 21 in Lincoln Heights. It is one of the largest nonprofit thrift floors in the city, it prices by appearance rather than by brand, and it carries furniture and housewares alongside clothing. For pure cost-per-item, the Goodwill outlet at 3150 N San Fernando Rd sells by weight.

When is the Jet Rag $1 sale?

Sundays, in the parking lot at 825 N La Brea Ave. Everything laid out in the lot is one dollar. It draws a large, competitive crowd, so arrive early, bring exact change, and expect to dig on the ground rather than browse a rack.

Is the Goodwill outlet in Los Angeles worth it for resellers?

Yes, if you can tolerate volume sorting. The Atwater Village outlet at 3150 N San Fernando Rd is open 8am to 7pm daily and sells clothing from bins by weight, which puts your cost per garment far below a retail thrift store. In exchange you sort unsorted, unwashed stock with no guarantee anything good is in the bin that day.

Are LA thrift stores still cheap in 2026?

Chain and curated stores are not. Vintage-focused shops on Melrose and in Echo Park price close to resale value, which leaves little margin. Nonprofit floors and the outlet are where the gap between shelf price and market price still exists, because they price by appearance rather than by brand research.

How many thrift stores are there in Los Angeles?

No authoritative count exists. Directory sites publish figures in the low hundreds, but those lists mix charity thrift, curated vintage, consignment and buy-sell-trade under one label and are not audited. Treat any specific number you see quoted as an estimate.

The best thrift stores in Los Angeles for resellers (2026)

For resale sourcing in Los Angeles, start with St. Vincent de Paul in Lincoln Heights, Jet Rag's $1 Sunday sale on La Brea, and the Goodwill outlet on N San Fernando Road, where clothing is sold by weight. Public Estrellas, Crossroads Los Feliz and TROVE in Westwood are the strongest curated stops for branded pieces.

Short answer: for resale sourcing in Los Angeles, start with St. Vincent de Paul in Lincoln Heights, Jet Rag's $1 Sunday sale on La Brea, and the Goodwill outlet on N San Fernando Road, where clothing is sold by weight. Public Estrellas, Crossroads Los Feliz and TROVE in Westwood are the strongest curated stops for branded pieces.

Most "best thrift stores in LA" lists are written for people who want an interesting afternoon. This one is written for people who intend to sell what they buy, which is a different question with a different answer. A shop can be a wonderful place to spend an hour and a terrible place to source, and the shops that get written up most often tend to be exactly that: beautifully curated, correctly priced, and therefore useless to you.

The single variable that matters is the gap between what the store charges and what the item is worth. That gap is widest where the pricer is working fast, by appearance, without brand research — which in practice means large nonprofit floors and the outlet. It is narrowest where somebody has already done your job for you.

The 12 stores

Addresses below were checked against each store's own listing on 8 September 2026. All are in the City of Los Angeles.

#	Store	Where	Best for	The resale read
1	Society of St. Vincent de Paul	210 N Avenue 21, Lincoln Heights	Volume: clothing, furniture, housewares	One of the biggest nonprofit floors in the city, priced by appearance. The best odds of finding something the pricer did not recognise
2	Goodwill SoCal Outlet	3150 N San Fernando Rd, Atwater Village	Bin digging, sold by weight	Lowest cost per garment in LA. Open 8am–7pm daily. All sales final, nothing is sorted, and you will want gloves
3	Jet Rag	825 N La Brea Ave, Hollywood	Vintage, plus the $1 Sunday lot sale	Weekday prices are vintage-store prices. Sunday is the event: everything in the lot is a dollar, and the crowd is serious
4	Public Estrellas	2701 N Broadway, Lincoln Heights	Curated international secondhand	Opened 2023 and organised by colour. Imported European and Japanese stock means labels that US pricers have not learned yet
5	Out of the Closet	6210 Sunset Blvd, Hollywood (and five more LA locations)	Traditional charity thrift	Run by AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Locations vary enormously — the Westside and Atwater stores take donations from wealthier ZIP codes
6	Crossroads Trading, Los Feliz	4470 Sunset Blvd, Los Feliz	Contemporary brands, buy-sell-trade	Staff already priced against resale, so margins are thin. Useful for the reverse trade: selling them your slow inventory
7	TROVE	2008 Westwood Blvd, Westwood	Designer and consignment	Higher entry price, higher ceiling. Worth a stop when you are hunting one $300 handbag rather than twenty $40 flips
8	Starday Vintage	4665 Hollywood Blvd, East Hollywood	Genuine older garments	Small and properly vintage. Go for single-stitch tees and tag-dated pieces, not for volume
9	Helping Hand Thrift Shop	1033 S Fairfax Ave, South Fairfax	Old-fashioned digging	An independent thrift store rather than a chain, which means inconsistent pricing — the condition you want
10	Detoure	7555 Melrose Ave, Melrose	Influencer-closet and overstock resale	Opened 2024 on a different model: sourced from influencers' closets and brand overstock. Contemporary labels, already curated
11	Sunday's Best Vintage	1557 W Sunset Blvd, Echo Park	Curated vintage	Priced by people who know what vintage is worth. Go to learn what things sell for, not to buy
12	Martha's Thrift Shop	2681 W Pico Blvd, Pico-Union	Small neighbourhood thrift	Cheap and unpredictable. Twenty minutes, not two hours

The order to actually visit them in

Ranking is not routing. Los Angeles punishes anyone who plans a day by store quality instead of by geography — the difference between a good route and a bad one is roughly two hours of the 101.

A full sourcing day, east to west:

Goodwill outlet, Atwater Village — first, at opening. Bins get picked over through the day and your cost basis is lowest here, so spend your energy while you have it.
St. Vincent de Paul, Lincoln Heights — ten minutes away, and the highest-volume floor on the list.
Public Estrellas, Lincoln Heights — same neighbourhood, completely different inventory.
Out of the Closet, Atwater or Los Feliz — cheap to add, since you are already there.
Crossroads, Los Feliz — bring the previous week's unsold inventory to sell to them while you are in the door.
Jet Rag / Helping Hand / Detoure — the central Hollywood–La Brea–Melrose–Fairfax cluster, all within a few minutes of each other.
TROVE, Westwood — last, and only if you are hunting high-ticket. It is a genuine westside detour.

A half day, if you only want the margin: the outlet, then St. Vincent de Paul, then home. Those two stops are where the gap between shelf price and market price lives. Everything else on this list is either curated, chained, or small.

Sunday is its own plan. The Jet Rag lot sale reorganises the whole day around itself. If you are going, go there first and early, and treat the rest of the day as optional.

What this list is not

It is not ordered by review score. Aggregator rankings measure customer satisfaction, and customer satisfaction and sourcing margin are close to inversely correlated — the stores shoppers love most are the ones that have already priced their stock correctly.

It is also not a claim that any given store will have something today. Thrift inventory is a random process. A store's real quality is its rate: how often, across many visits, it prices something below what it is worth. That is what the ordering above tries to capture, and it is a judgement, not a measurement.

What Los Angeles specifically produces

This section is practitioner consensus rather than measured data, and it is worth reading as a set of hypotheses to test against your own sold history rather than as fact.

Outdoor and technical shells turn up disproportionately, because Angelenos buy Patagonia and Arc'teryx for two weekends a year in the Sierras and then donate them essentially unworn.
Denim runs deep, both because of volume and because dry heat and low humidity are kind to it. Tag details do more work here than in most cities.
Entertainment-industry churn puts unusual things into circulation: wardrobe department clear-outs, promo and crew apparel, event and tour merchandise that never reached retail.
Almost no heavy winter coats, which is worth knowing if you sell to the Midwest and East Coast in autumn. Sourcing them in LA is slow.
Westside donation stock skews expensive and eastside stock skews vintage — a real pattern, though not one anybody has quantified.

Whatever the category, the arithmetic is the same everywhere: the sold comparable, minus the marketplace's cut, minus shipping, minus what you paid. Our reseller fee guide has the current rates read from each marketplace's own documentation, and the free profit calculator will do the subtraction for you.

Before you carry it to the register

The thing that separates a profitable LA sourcing day from an expensive one is not which store you picked. It is whether you checked the item while you were still standing next to the rack, when putting it back is free.

Three checks, in order:

Can you name it specifically enough to title a listing? "Grey wool sweater" is not a listing. "Pendleton Wool Crewneck Sweater Men's Large Made in USA" is.
What have identical ones actually sold for? Not asking prices — sold prices. This is the only number that means anything.
What is left after fees and shipping? On a $40 sale, the marketplace cut plus postage routinely takes a third.

Method

Every address, neighbourhood and set of opening hours in this guide was checked on 8 September 2026 against the store's own website or its own listing, not against a directory or an SEO round-up. Where a store does not publish something — the Goodwill outlet does not publish a per-pound rate on its own site, for example — this guide says so rather than repeating a figure from a blog.

The ranking is editorial judgement about resale sourcing potential. It is not derived from review scores, foot traffic, or sales data, and no store on this list paid to be here. ThriftProfit carries no advertising and no affiliate links.

The claims in What Los Angeles specifically produces are practitioner consensus and are labelled as such above. Nobody publishes donation-composition data by city, so treat them as testable hypotheses.

Corrections and additions

Store hours change, shops close, and neighbourhood knowledge ages faster than anything else on this site. If a detail here is wrong, or a store belongs on the list and is not, tell us at appthego@gmail.com and include what you saw and when. Corrections are made against the store's own listing and the updated date on this page changes when they are.