Public Thrift, the worker-owned shop on Joseph Campau, closes in Hamtramck

Public Thrift, the worker-owned second-hand store at 10237 Joseph Campau in Hamtramck, has closed. The shop ran a final Fill A Bag sale on May 9 and 10, 2025, marking everything down to five dollars a bag and dropping household goods to a dollar. Hangers, racks, and store fixtures were tagged and sold off too.

The store began as yard sales and pop-ups at farmers markets and festivals in 2019. It went through Build Institute's incubator program and ran a brief Corktown location starting in January 2020 that lasted only about two months before the pandemic shut it down. The brick-and-mortar shop on Joseph Campau opened in September 2021.

The model set it apart. Public Thrift was a worker-owned cooperative, meaning the people who worked the floor each held an equal ownership stake and a share in the decisions. It started with three co-founders and grew to six worker-owners, and described itself as woman-owned, Black-owned, and queer-owned. Margo Dalal, one of the co-founders, also runs the Detroit Community Wealth Fund, a nonprofit that finances and supports cooperative businesses. Public Thrift was one of the businesses that took a loan from the fund, which lends to worker-owned co-ops on terms tied to actual profits rather than fixed repayment.

The dandelion in the store's logo was a deliberate choice. "My two co-founders from Detroit said there are dandelions everywhere in the city. It's a common plant that kind of gets a bad rap for being a weed," Dalal told Model D.

The shop raised money through a Patronicity crowdfunding campaign, which sought around ten thousand dollars for buildout, inventory, licensing, and operating costs, on top of the Community Wealth Fund loan and donations.

Inside, the merchandise was a standard thrift mix of clothing, shoes, bags, books, household goods, furniture, and art, and nothing was sorted by gender. Donations were screened rather than accepted blindly. "We have lots of standards that we ask people to take a look at on our website first, and then when you drop off stuff, we're actually going to look through items and let you know what we'll accept," Dalal told Metromode.

The Joseph Campau storefront put the shop on a stretch shared with other worker-owned cooperatives, including the bookstore Book Suey and Iyengar Yoga Detroit, both within walking distance.

The owners have not publicly stated a reason for the closure. The store posted its final sale to its Facebook and Instagram accounts and shut down after the May 9 and 10 weekend.