Thrift Trader owner Jeff Clark’s business savvy keeps his stores stocked

By Dave Schwab | SDUN Reporter

Thrift Trader in North Park is the most recent venture for Jeff Clark in the resale business. He started the now-closed and once widely popular Music Trader discount chain for $900 in 1987, selling it years later after it attained $13 million in sales.

And he is still in business, owning and running Thrift Trader at 3939 Iowa St., as well as two locations in Ocean Beach and another in Pacific Beach. “I always knew that the idea [of thrift] was great and that people would respond to it,” Clark said.

He learned from those first forays into business, saying he did not have to borrow money to begin with and he sold the chain at a good time.

The entrepreneur had been working a job he said he did not really enjoy when he was inspired to start the Music Trader business, after responding to a radio advertisement by Monte Kobey of Kobey’s Swap Meet.

Clark started out with scores of vendors doing resale in the Walker Scott building Downtown, though he said it was not as successful as he wanted.

“The enterprise didn’t really work,” Clark said, “but it whetted my appetite, and I was able to survive there, and start building a clientele and learning about resale.”

Navigating the peaks and valleys of resale, Clark said he made mistakes along the way, but is happy to be in business with Thrift Trader in North Park. He said he was looking for more.

If he is worried about inventory, he need not be.

“There’s somewhere between 5 and 8 million items in this building,” he said during a walkthrough of the North Park store, which buys, sells and trades everything from clothing, books and electronics to CDs, DVDs and LPs. In fact, Thrift Trader sells “everything groovy,” Clark’s business card reads.

“The idea for me was to be around the stuff that I like,” Clark said. “I understand that teacups sell at thrift stores. I’m not interested in teacups, but I am interested in music, movies [and] clothes. … It revs me up because I can see it connecting with our customers.”

Like a sunken treasure, there are 33 rooms behind the scenes at Thrift Trader, all overloaded with stockpiled goods. Clark said he sees value in his overstock, and is not ready to throw anything out. One large box in the store was spilling over with CDs, and the storeowner said there is a “vinyl renaissance” happening right now.

Clothing, though, is both the store’s biggest seller and future, Clark said, with most of the items coming directly from trade-ins. “If you were to watch the counter here today, your mind would be blown at the nonstop stuff coming through the front door,” he said.

Employee Tami Thomas called the “never-ending” transactions a “roller-coaster ride,” and store manager, Macy Aalto, said the job was fun and challenging.

Because of the clothing sales, they are working to convert the building’s air-conditioned upstairs space, once a dentist’s office, into a re-sale boutique. Plans are not set for an open date, but the team has already cleared out the space and painted the rooms.

Clark said his loyal customers choose Thrift Trader instead of shopping over the internet for a variety of reasons, including lower prices, nostalgia, their funky atmosphere and their vast selection.

“People are wowed just by the visual when walking in. I think we measure up to it once they start looking at the product,” he said. The customer base is vast, too, with the average age around 25 years old.

“For records, it’s a lot of younger people,” Clark said, “[with] kids that have gotten their parent’s Black Sabbath records and want the rest of that classic rock,” though the store welcomes everyone.

“We’re not doing our job – we’re doing something wrong – if somebody walks out of any of our stores without finding something at the prices that we have,” he said. “My strength is filling the stores with good stuff. That’s what it boils down to, good stuff at a good price. That’s always going to be in fashion no matter the economy.”