Newburgh Vintage Emporium Ware-House — Attraction in Town of Newburgh

New to NBG, wanted to go thrifting while waiting for my house to be ready. This place is an antique store cleverly disguised as a vintage thrift store. Vendors probably scour goodwills and estate sales, pick curated items for pennies, and then sell them at their vendor booths for 20x the price. Not knocking their hustle, but advertise as a vendor-lead antique store. Won’t be visiting any of their locations again.

EDIT: Their condescending and facetious response just adds to the concern that this is not an ethically-responsible antique store. And because of their response, I went and read a bunch of other low-star reviews. Selling racist items? Then saying it's not their fault for selling them, then saying it wasn't a fair low-star review, seems to be on-par with their whole business model.

But you edited your response, and so I will do the same and leave a more detailed review of WHY vendor-thrift stores are unethical.

Your business model is gentrification in its most basic form. Your vendors are physically taking away from their local community by purchasing low-price items, and selling them at 20x the price. When your vendors aggressively "pick" these stores clean of valuable items, it limits access to affordable quality goods for those who rely on them most, directly opposing the stores’ charitable mission. All items in those stores are donated, often by people in good-faith, who want their possessions to benefit low-income individuals or charitable causes — not to enrich private resellers.

While purchasing low-price vintage items and reselling at 10x-50x the price isn't necessarily illegal, it's definitely unethical in every sense of the word. Your vendors are profiting from a system designed to uplift the vulnerable, without contributing to that mission, and often at its expense. They're using the infrastructure (donated labor, low prices, good intentions) as a supply line for personal gain. It’s one thing to profit from business innovation or their own ideas, but it’s entirely different to profit from a system designed to help the disadvantaged.

Creating artificial scarcity of items by hoarding them, and then reselling at inflated prices is manipulative. Some of the items in your store are sold online for 1/3 or 1/4 of the price. People think they are getting high-value items because they're paying a high price, when in reality, the value of the item is low.

Thrift stores have now caught on to the fact that they are losing revenue on high-ticket items, and are starting niche online-market sites, and raising prices on items that would normally be sold at nominal fees to low-income households that they are designed to support.

Sorry that you're not able to justify your unethical, racist business model and feel the need to make jabs at a new local who has genuine concerns for their new...

I deeply appreciate how pet-friendly this business is. My little Schnauzer is always welcome there, which is great as I've noticed recently that more and more pet-friendly business are becoming unwelcoming of dogs. I've also taken time to read some of the negative reviews here. Some of them were posted by patrons who didn't bother to mind posted business hours (Always Google business hours before you visit, especially if you're traveling far!), had moral issues with problematic merchandise being sold (fair, but I also lean towards the belief that uglier parts of our history shouldn't be swept under the rug; as a matter of fact, if NVE never had some of these items for sale in the first place, I would have never learned the history of their creations through a negative review! How ironic!), "overpriced merchandise" (lol did you think NVE was a peddler's flea market? VINTAGE and ANTIQUE items are RARE and VALUABLE, ergo EXPENSIVE.)

I've never had a bad experience at NVE. The staff have always treated me kindly and with respect. Maybe some of these Negative Nancies caught staff members on a bad day, but who among us is without fault? We're all human.

Anyway, I love NVE, and I've "harvested" many-a gem from this business. I haven't been to their newest location yet, but I'm hoping to make my way out there someday. I'm also holding out a thread of hope that they may even expand west of Newburgh someday. I'd be over the moon to have a location even closer to home.

Fingers...

As a long time collector and seller, a great majority of items are heavily overpriced. Almost everything can be found online for half the cost. I came across multiple Haegers that can be found for 1/6 of the cost online. Additionally, many items are mislabeled as “blenko” or “Viking glass” when in fact they are not. I get the convenience of going to a store but damn, this kind of charge is absurd.

Customer service was also strange. There was a woman who made a particularly odd comment about my age, that I look like a “child” although I am in my late 30’s. That was unusual and inappropriate. Her tone wasn’t friendly either, it was meant as a “you’re inferior to me because of your chronological age” kind of tone. Regardless of her intent, this whole interaction was...