The exterior of the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
t’s a sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, and the place to be is a San Francisco thrift store at happy hour. The clang-clang of passing cable cars rings out as throngs of people file in to sift through racks of clothing, tchotchkes and assorted housewares, and a serpentine line is already wrapping around the cash register. A teenager is piling everything he possibly can into a Rasputin Records tote bag; another customer slings a fur coat over her shoulder, humming along to Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song” as it plays from a crackling speaker.
The 40% off sale is underway from 3-7 p.m. — each customer was alerted to it via text message the day before. The strategy is one of many ways the Polk Street outpost of Out of the Closet, a Los Angeles-founded thrift store chain with 26 stores across the U.S., is adapting to the modern landscape of secondhand shopping and a younger demographic of customers that seems to be growing every day.
“It’s hectic,” admits Chantal Smith, a district manager who oversees all four Bay Area stores: this one, the Folsom Street location, and two others in Oakland and Berkeley. “But it goes by quick.”
And the impact is staggering. General manager Jonathan Kreuyer told SFGATE that after a text alert goes out, sales can rise from $3,500 to $9,000 in a single day. “We found something that works for us,” he said, standing in the donation drop-off area behind the store.
The 4,000-square-foot store in the shell of a former Gap has been around for over 20 years. It was nearly razed during the early pandemic, but is now considered the most successful location Out of the Closet has in the Bay Area, making approximately $30,000 more per year than its sister store in SoMa. Part of that has to do with its location, which is within walking distance of a handful of hotels.
Customers look at clothing at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Customers hold goods they’ve selected at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Customers look at clothing at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
“We see a lot of flight attendants come through here,” Kreuyer said. “People that are just coming to the city for a vacation. I would say probably 50% of our customers are tourists.”
The rest are, for the most part, regulars, ranging from students to district attorneys to blue-collar workers who linger for a few minutes to decompress after they’re done with their shift. “We have shoppers that come in every single day,” Smith said. “We know them by name, they know what’s new. We’re here for all of them.”
The early years
The first Out of the Closet store opened in October 1990 in Los Angeles’ Atwater Village, as a scrappy fundraising location for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. The name of the store was coined by founder Michael Weinstein, signaling that it was a place that embraced the queer community and offered a wide selection of donated goods. It didn’t have the organized clothing racks and mannequin-filled window displays the chain is known for today. Instead, customers shopped from massive bins, filled bags of clothes for $5, and everything was run by volunteers, according to Kreuyer.
He found his way to the thrift store chain’s Laurel Canyon location in 1995, when he had just moved from Michigan to Los Angeles and was looking for a job.
The exterior of one of the first Out of the Closet thrift stores.
Courtesy of Out of the Closet
Inside one of the first Out of the Closet thrift stores.
Courtesy of Out of the Closet
“Back then, you would go to the gay and lesbian center in LA and do an aptitude test, and then they would find you a job, and a coach would come in and check on how you were doing,” Kreuyer said. “I started out as a cashier.”
Kreuyer described Out of the Closet’s model as groundbreaking and “uncommon” at the time. After the Reagan administration ignored the HIV/AIDS crisis that would become the second-leading cause of death among young men, claiming the lives of more than 100,000 people by 1990, Out of the Closet provided one of the first spaces where people could go and get tested safely and easily for free without calling attention to themselves or having to book an appointment.
“So people think Bill is going to Out of the Closet to shop, but he’s really going in there to get tested,” Kreuyer explained.
The thrift store chain quickly became “one of the largest testing agencies in the county,” administering 7,000 tests in a year, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2001. The company’s revenue — 96 cents of every dollar earned from sales and donations — also helped fund hospice and healthcare centers run by the foundation and as it expanded its testing services to cover STDs.
But not everyone was thrilled with Out of the Closet’s mission. A store in Silver Lake was served eviction papers in 2003 after the Circuit City it shared a building with asked employees to take down the “Free HIV testing” signs. When the thrift store’s lease was up, the now-defunct electronics retailer declined to renew it, citing plans to expand, the chain said on Instagram.
Out of the Closet is recognized by the California Assembly at a ribbon-cutting event.
Courtesy of Out of the Closet
The opening of Out of the Closet’s store in Chicago, Jan. 31, 2026.
Courtesy of Out of the Closet
“We were kicked out,” Kreuyer said. “So we protested.”
Other challenges to keeping stores open mounted, largely due to rising rents in California. The former Duboce Triangle store on Church Street shuttered in 2014 after a dispute with its landlord that was later settled in court.
But Kreuyer said that today, the chain is profitable and operating at its peak with stores in nine states, plus a dispatch center. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation also branched out into a food pantry division called Food for Health and a Healthy Housing program with 11 hotels in Los Angeles. He estimated close to 2 million people shop at Out of the Closet stores across the nation each year.
“Back in the day, it was tough. Thrifting wasn’t as much of a thing,” he said, emphasizing the last word. “But after COVID, we’ve seen a huge influx.”
Delving into donations
At the Polk Street store, donations are processed in a dim, fluorescent-lit room in the back, where piles of unsorted clothes are stacked up nearly 10 feet high. Kreuyer said the store accepts donations seven days a week and usually receives around 50 per day, an increase of about 15% since before the pandemic.
“It could be a few bags, or it could be a truckload,” he said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”
Customers look at clothing at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Donated clothes sit in a large bin waiting to be sorted at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Smith, the district manager, said the store organizes four to six clothing racks per day with 100 garments on each one. They’re tagged with the appropriate sales color for the week, then priced and wheeled out onto the floor. While it may seem like no thrift store is safe from rising costs, Out of the Closet is unique in that clothing items that are not sold within two weeks are marked down by 30% off, then 50% off the following week, then to $1. Not all donations are treated equally: Higher-ticket items have always been stored in a glass display case near the register and in the last few years, the chain has adopted designer clothing racks that are priced accordingly.
“We usually throw out a mixture of some good finds and stuff that might not be the greatest,” Smith said, tracing each garment with her fingers until finding a blouse with the tags still on, and tossing it into a pile. “We don’t want customers to come to a sale and it’s just a bunch of things that are not worth their time. We want them to keep coming back.”
At a time when organizations like Goodwill San Francisco Bay have struggled to process their donations to the point of having to ship them out of state, Out of the Closet takes a different approach: If a particular location has a surplus in inventory, that store will throw a parking lot sale, laying out tarps and selling everything for $2 each. If one store is overflowing and another has more empty racks, staff will move stock between stores. Anything that doesn’t sell “goes to textile,” meaning it is shipped off to a recycling company that pays them by the pound. Kreuyer said about 25% of Out of the Closet’s donations are resigned to that fate.
But a lot of merchandise — namely vintage and name-brand — is snatched up by a growing contingent of resellers, who then consign the garments at vintage stores or online via eBay, Depop or Facebook Marketplace. At the Berkeley store, Smith said it’s not unusual to see at least eight resellers waiting out front before the doors open.
Water bottles for sale at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Customers look at clothing at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
“They kind of beeline to the new stuff and they’re quick,” she said, mimicking the action of going through a clothing rack at lightning speed, her bracelets jangling against her wrist. “I wouldn’t say they’re our target audience, but they know what they’re looking for.”
Employees might not get first dibs on the vast selection that comes through each store, but they do receive a 30%-off discount to shop with on top of a monthly $50 voucher. Smith said it’s not uncommon for her or other staff to find something they want while they’re processing donations and race out to the floor during their lunch hour to look for it later.
“I always say that if it’s not there anymore, it wasn’t meant for you,” she said with a laugh. “And hopefully you find something in the future that’s very similar.”
Out of the Closet also arranges pickups for larger donations, with staff driving out to estate sales, store closures and, on at least one occasion, a celebrity home. About 15 years ago, Kreuyer recounted spending three weeks processing 47 truckloads of clothing at a woman’s house in Los Angeles. He declined to identify who she was, but said everything was designer, his staff was required to dress in khakis and whites, and they had to rent out trucks without the store’s logos.
“It was probably a decade’s worth of all her clothing,” he said.
District manager Chantal Smith and general manager Jonathan Kreuyer at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
The exterior of the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Smith also recounted a time last year when a furniture store was closing in South San Francisco. She had to navigate the process of moving extremely heavy but fragile antique lamps, vases and cabinets from the warehouse, while also dodging crowds hoping to score a deal during the store’s liquidation sale.
“It was a madhouse down there,” she remembered. “You’re just there hoping you don’t break anything.”
Plans for the future
Out of the Closet is continuing to open new stores throughout the U.S., debuting its latest location in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood back in January. Kreuyer said its expansion is driven by parts of the country where HIV rates are higher but free services are not as widely available. It’s unlikely the chain will ever open a stand-alone thrift store again, he said, instead opting for locations that also serve as healthcare centers.
“The success of that is when people come into stores and shop, they’re able to see where their money is going,” Kreuyer said.
Still, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation has courted some controversy in recent years. Weinstein’s opposing stance on preventative HIV medications like PReP has been widely scrutinized, though all of the organization's wellness centers now provide the drug.
A sign with information about how to donate a large amount of items at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco, seen on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Customers look at clothing at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
Like other thrift stores, Out of the Closet has gone the way of eliminating its dressing rooms after the pandemic, which Kreuyer attributed to theft and the time it takes to return clothing to their proper racks. “People leave it a mess,” he said.
But as the thrift store’s peers, such as Goodwill and Salvation Army, have moved to selling some of their higher-end merchandise online, Kreuyer and Smith said Out of the Closet doesn’t plan to follow the trend.
“It kind of takes away the treasure hunt, the feeling that you never know what you’re going to find,” Smith said.
As the happy hour sale winds down, customers trickle out onto the sidewalk, chatting and laughing with shopping bags in hand. (I decided to dedicate my trip to emotional support trinkets: a vintage Muir Woods snow globe and a pill box with Snoopy on it.) For now, Kreuyer and Smith are grateful that the Polk Street store is even still open. When they learned of the news in 2018 that a developer was planning to demolish the half-block strip of Polk Street where Out of the Closet, Fashion Exchange and Jeet Big Times Smoke Shop currently operate, “It was a scary time,” Smith said. Approved plans for the site included a seven-story building with 63 condos, 8,000 square feet of new retail space and an underground parking garage.
A display on top of a clothing rack at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco, on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
A customer looks at used electronics and household items at the Out of the Closet store on Polk Street in San Francisco on June 10, 2026.
Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
“I remember driving around San Francisco trying to find any building that would make sense for us to move into,” she continued. They wanted to stay close to the area so as not to lose their customer base, “but it was tough. For now, we’re staying here for as long as we can and hopefully for a while.”
Though the site was listed for sale in 2022, the project was stalled and the commercial building is no longer on the market. Kreuyer confirmed the store’s lease is intact, at least for the next couple of years.
“We don’t know what the future holds,” he said. “But the landlord has been very gracious to us and believes in our mission.”