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

Short answer: for resale sourcing in Los Angeles, start with St. Vincent de Paul in Lincoln Heights and the Goodwill outlet on N San Fernando Road, where clothing is sold by weight. Jet Rag’s Sunday event can be a useful additional stop, but confirm current terms directly with the store. Public Estrellas, Crossroads Los Feliz and TROVE in Westwood are curated options to compare.

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

The Sources section records the store-owned pages used for the location details that could be independently checked on 10 September 2026. This is an editorial short-list, not a guarantee of current hours, event terms, stock or resale margin; confirm those details before visiting.

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:

1. 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.
2. St. Vincent de Paul, Lincoln Heights — ten minutes away, and the highest-volume floor on the list.
3. Public Estrellas, Lincoln Heights — same neighbourhood, completely different inventory.
4. Out of the Closet, Atwater or Los Feliz — cheap to add, since you are already there.
5. Crossroads, Los Feliz — bring the previous week's unsold inventory to sell to them while you are in the door.
6. Jet Rag / Helping Hand / Detoure — the central Hollywood–La Brea–Melrose–Fairfax cluster, all within a few minutes of each other.
7. 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. If Jet Rag confirms a Sunday event, plan around the terms it publishes at that time 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:

1. 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.
2. What have identical ones actually sold for? Not asking prices — sold prices. This is the only number that means anything.
3. What is left after fees and shipping? On a $40 sale, the marketplace cut plus postage routinely takes a third.

Method

The source-backed location facts in this guide were checked on 10 September 2026 against the store-owned pages listed below. Where a current store-owned source was unavailable, the guide does not present a precise price, event term or operating claim as fact. Always reconfirm the store’s current listing before leaving.

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.