US secondhand/thrift store market

Somewhere in the cosmic accounting department, a ledger keeper has noticed that as Americans have grown increasingly keen on buying other people's old trousers, British publicans have been charging proportionally more for a pint of lager, and no one has thought to question whether these two phenomena might be cousins in some vast, indifferent machinery of capitalism. The correlation sits at 0.989, which is to say: nearly perfect, which is to say: deeply, troublingly suspicious. One begins to wonder what the universe is trying to tell us about the relationship between thrift and beer.

What we're almost certainly witnessing is the slow creep of inflation across both economies, that great invisible hand that reaches into vintage shops and gastropubs with equal indifference. Between 2012 and 2023, the secondhand market in the US grew from about 17 billion dollars to roughly 40 billion—a doubling, essentially—while UK lager prices climbed from around £3.50 to nearly £5.50 per pint, and both movements trace back to the same underlying economic pressures: wage stagnation meeting cost-of-living increases, which sends consumers hunting for bargains in one domain while simultaneously paying more for their small comforts in another. It's rather like watching someone patch their trousers with found fabric while their local pub grows incrementally more expensive, which is exactly what happened, because both thrift stores and pubs exist in the same inflationary universe.

The correlation is real but tells us almost nothing, which is the sort of discovery that should delight rather than alarm us. It's a reminder that the world contains multitudes of unrelated things moving in tandem, mostly because they're all subject to the same economic gravity. We see patterns because patterns are genuinely everywhere. We just rarely ask why the patterns are there before we've already decided they mean something profound. The secondhand market and British lager prices are, in fact, just two graphs that climbed the same hill.