What’s In Store is a secondhand shop serving Kitimat, a compact district municipality at the head of the Douglas Channel in northwestern British Columbia, built in the 1950s as a planned company town for what was then Alcan’s aluminum smelter and now operated by Rio Tinto. The town sits on Haisla Nation traditional territory roughly an hour from Terrace along Highway 37, and in recent years it has also become closely associated with the LNG Canada export terminal, one of the largest industrial construction projects in the province’s history, which has brought waves of temporary workers and new residents through the community.
The business’s own web presence at whatsinstorethrift.com identifies it plainly by name and location, and the thrift framing built into its own domain signals a secondhand retail model: donated or resold clothing, housewares, and everyday goods offered at prices well below new retail, the kind of shop that becomes especially useful in a small, geographically isolated town where big-box retail options are limited and shipping costs on new goods can run high. In a community like Kitimat, where the nearest larger shopping centres are in Terrace or, further still, Prince Rupert or Prince George, a local thrift shop fills a genuine gap for residents furnishing a home, replacing a work wardrobe, or simply looking for an affordable alternative to ordering everything online.
Because the business’s detailed inventory, current hours, and specific donation policies were not independently verifiable at the time of writing, anyone planning a visit is encouraged to check the shop’s website or reach out directly beforehand, a practical step in any small northern town where staffing and hours can shift with the seasons and with the broader ebb and flow of industrial project work in the area. What can be said with confidence is that a thrift shop operating in Kitimat inherently serves a distinctive customer base: longtime Kitimat and Haisla community residents alongside a rotating population of contract and construction workers drawn north by the smelter and the LNG terminal, giving the shop’s donation stream and customer traffic a rhythm shaped as much by industrial cycles as by ordinary household turnover.
Kitimat’s relative remoteness, at the end of a long fjord-like inlet reachable primarily by a single highway connection to Terrace, means local secondhand shopping also carries an environmental logic: keeping usable clothing, furniture, and household goods circulating within the community rather than trucking them out to a landfill or ordering brand-new replacements from distribution centres hundreds of kilometres away. For residents and newly arrived workers alike, a stop at What’s In Store offers a practical, budget-friendly way to outfit a household in a town where retail choices are naturally limited by geography. In short, What’s In Store is a Kitimat, British Columbia secondhand shop offering affordable clothing and household goods to a northern industrial community shaped by its aluminum-smelter roots and its more recent LNG-driven growth.
