Sixty-six chain doors, four hundred and ninety independents
Ask someone in Massachusetts to name a thrift store and you will hear Goodwill, Savers or the Salvation Army — two charities and a for-profit that pays charities by the pound. As of 7 September 2026 those three, together with St. Vincent de Paul and Habitat for Humanity's ReStores, account for 66 of the 564 shops in the Gazette: 20 Goodwill stores, 18 Salvation Army, 14 Savers, 8 St. Vincent de Paul and 6 ReStores. That is 12 percent. The other 498 are independents — a single owner, a church basement, a hospital auxiliary, a dealer with one door.
The share is not even across the map. The North Shore has the most listings of any region, 122, of which 13 are chain doors. Metrowest has 52 listings and only 3 chain doors, the lowest share of any populated region: a reader there is shopping independents whether they mean to or not. Cape Cod's 67 listings include 5 chain doors, and the rest are the church and hospital thrift shops that run the Cape's summer economy in second-hand goods.
At the other end, the Berkshires' 29 listings include 6 chain doors, one in five. The Pioneer Valley, which now runs from the Vermont line down through Springfield, has 63 listings and 9 chain doors; how thin the Springfield end of it was until this week, and what was done about it, has its own column.
The chains matter for a specific reason: predictability. A chain store publishes its hours and takes cards; a church thrift shop may open Thursday and Saturday mornings and take cash. The directory carries hours for 407 of the 564 shops and a website for 401, and the shops without either are overwhelmingly independents. If you are driving more than twenty minutes, the listing page tells you whether to ring first.
What the independents have instead is stock that was never sorted by a central warehouse. A chain store's floor is the same in Danvers as in Brockton because it is stocked to be. The 498 independents are what makes one town different from the next, and they are the reason the directory exists at all: the chains do not need a listing to be found.
Method: a listing counts as a chain door if its name carries one of the five brands. The count is of shops we have confirmed against Google's business record for the address, and it moves as the directory does; the figures above are true on the date at the top of this column.