In order to better understand the needs and values of Thrift Store customers, we conducted framework analysis of Yelp Reviews for second hand stores in Portland. From Han’s dissertation, we gathered our a priori, theoretical frameworks for possible consumer motivations for second hand consumption (2013). These frameworks are:
- Economic (financial advantages of frugal shoppers getting cheaper alternatives)
- Ethical consumerism (awareness of ecological and social impacts)
- Hedonic/Recreational Shopping
We then did a systematic random sampling of 93 stores Yelp has tagged under “Portland, OR”, “Thrift Stores”, and “Used, Consignment, & Vintage” to gather data from their reviews to test any correspondence with the values Han proposes.
Through this sampling, we recorded 10 different data points for store specifics including: Name of store, Type of store, Shop Location, Price bracket on Yelp, Payment Methods available, Parking available, Wheelchair Accessibility, Number of Stars, Number of Reviews, and Any “other” relevant characteristics. We coded the “type of store” as either “consignment” if customers can both buy and sell clothing, or “thrift” if clothing can only be bought. The price bracket was indicated by the number of dollar signs a store was attributed.
We then sampled reviews from these stores. We chose stores that had over five reviews and coded up to ten of the reviews. We stratified the reviews in order of newest to oldest and worked our way down in order to have the most recent and relevant data to current thrift store popularity. Once our 5-10 newest reviews were selected, we noted distinguishing information down in the store’s own spreadsheet (date of review, number of stars given) and then conducted our framework analysis by labeling values and motivations to lines of text from the reviews. We coded Han’s values of “Economic”, “Ethical” (separated into “Ecological” and “Social”), and “Hedonic”. We then also coded for themes that emerged in our pilot study: “quality of clothing”, “service”, and “store organization”.
In order to code reviews according to these value frameworks, we discussed as a group keywords that would indicate a value. For example, references to name brands, “trendiness” or “treasure” hunting were all coded as hedonic motivation. We decided that specific comments or phrases could be coded multiple times if they displayed multiple values. For example, the comment “I found Doc Marten shoes for a price I could finally afford!”, would be coded as values that are both hedonic (because of the name brand) and economic. Whenever we encountered a review or phrase that we were uncertain about how to code, we highlighted it in the spreadsheet and debriefed with each other in person to maximize our cohesion and credibility.
Once we had all of this textual information organized, we quantified our results by tallying the number of times each value appeared in each store’s reviews and charted our results in a spreadsheet. We put these numbers into percentage-based graphs to see if we noticed any trends in the proportions of values for all second hand shoppers, consignment shoppers, and thrift shoppers (See figures 1-3). To complement this quantitative visual aid, we also made a “word cloud” by entering all of the phrases we coded from the reviews into worditout.com (See Figure 4).