Buying for Baby: How Middle-Class Mothers Negotiate Risk with Second-Hand Goods

Abstract

The passing on of used or otherwise second-hand baby and children’s goods is nothing new. Clothing, as well as toys and equipment, can barely be used by one child before growing out of them; that item now redundant for one family yet with plenty of useful life left in it for another (Gregson and Crewe, 1998). Such goods may be passed on to family or friends as ‘hand-me-downs’ or entered into semi-formalised systems of exchange including charity shops, car boot sales or online sale sites. The term ‘second-hand’ is used here to describe goods which have not been purchased brand new from conventional retail outlets but rather have already been owned and/or used by another. Whilst second-hand is the term commonly used in the UK and adopted by key authors including Gregson and Crewe (1997; 2003), in the US and other parts of the world ‘thrift’ is often appropriated and mirrored in the originating literature (Arnould and Bardhi, 2005; Medvedev, 2012).