About 100,000 second-hand items are ready to be scooped up from the sales floor at Value Village in Queensborough when it opens on Thursday.
The almost 30,000-square-foot recently built location is stocked with everything from clothes, shoes, jewelry to books, housewares, toys, and more.
"We have great stuff in here," store manager Todd Pols tells The Record during a recent preview of the spacious store.
Sweeping his arm around the housewares department, Pols says, "I'm most excited to let the customers into this department."
The shelves of housewares include coffee makers, rice cookers, plates, pots, Tupperware, glassware, kitschy goods, blenders, microwaves, and on and on.
Showing off armful of old silverware sets, Pols says, "We've get a really-good selection of high-end products here."
One could spend hours taking in the visual feast, and though there is much to look at, the store is laid out in a way that doesn't feel cluttered and randomly-thrown together like thrift stores typically do.
"We are set up like any retail store," Pols says. "Shoppers are able to target in on an area and find what they are looking for."
Thrift-store shopping isn't just for penny-pinchers anymore, according to Pols, who says their customer base is evolving.
Second-hand shopping has become more mainstream and appealing to those who want to purchase quality used goods for 10 to 30 per cent less than what they cost if they were new, he says.
The Queensborough store will be one of the biggest Value Village locations in the province, with 50 employees.
The Value Village thrift-store chain is owned by the Bellevue, Wash.-based, for-profit corporation Savers Inc. The company has a partnership with Clothesline, which supports the Canadian Diabetes Association among other groups, and pays the organization a portion of store donations.
Pols, who's worked for the company for seven years, is proud of the company's recycling efforts.
"We are one of the biggest recyclers in the world," he says.
Items that aren't sold or that are donated but don't make it to the sales floor go to sellers in developing nations, Pols says.
The Queensborough store manager was notes that the new location on the other side of the Fraser River is not meant to take over the Burnaby Value Village in Edmonds.
Seeing just how much stock there is in the new location, it's seems there is room for two jumbo-sized stores - for now, anyway.
Value Village Queensborough is location at #110-1135 Tanaka Crt.
