One of the biggest trends in the past few years has been thrifting. Thrifting refers to shopping at a thrift store or vintage clothing store, usually to find interesting items at a low price. Thrifting has become such a trend that some people will buy thrifted or vintage clothing at a significantly inflated price from a seller on websites like E-bay, Depop, and several others. A massive trend in clothing lately has been Y2K fashion. Y2K fashion refers to popular clothing trends in the early twenty-first century, such as low-rise and boot-cut jeans, mini skirts and dresses, crop tops, platform shoes, and bedazzled everything. For a long time, Y2K-Esque clothing has been readily available at thrift stores and Goodwill due to their decline in popularity. Once people realized that these trendy clothes could be purchased somewhere you can find in almost any town, fashionable people flocked to Goodwill and other thrift stores to buy and wear or buy and resell all of this trendy clothing. Teen girls were suddenly making hundreds of dollars a day from reselling thrifted clothes. Soon after, Goodwill and thrift store prices started to rise. The rise of these prices makes it harder for low-income families to purchase the clothes they need from places like Goodwill and other thrift stores. Goodwill is very well known for giving jobs to people with disabilities who would otherwise struggle to obtain employment, so Goodwill’s prices being raised seems like it would be an inherently good thing, but Goodwill uses a regulation called 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which states that businesses can apply for permits to pay disabled employees well below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. That amount can dip down to mere pennies in some cases. Sheila Leigland, a blind Goodwill employee in Great Falls, Montana, told Forbes reporter in 2013, “earning $3.99 an hour was already tough.” But when the Rockville, Md.-based nonprofit wanted to cut her salary to $2.75, she decided it was time to quit. Goodwill’s raised prices aren’t raising employee’s wages, which is another reason why the incline in prices isn’t beneficial to its original demographic. Gentrification has affected people with low incomes in the U.S. for many decades. You can help prevent the gentrification of Goodwill and other thrift stores by donating your old clothes. The surplus of thrift-flippers popping up on various resell websites raises the question: will the prices ever return to their previous affordability, or will they continue to rise to steeper, more inflated prices?