Princess Street in Kingston, Ontario is home to one of the city’s busiest secondhand retailers: Mission Thrift Store at 2455 Princess Street, a fixture of the Kingston shopping scene since 2009. Located along a well travelled commercial stretch on the city’s west side, the store draws shoppers from across Kingston and the surrounding Frontenac County area in search of affordable clothing, footwear, furniture, housewares, books, toys and seasonal goods, all of it donated by the community and resold at prices far below what the same items would cost new.
The Kingston location welcomes shoppers Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with the store closed on Sundays. Donations can be dropped off Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., though the donation dock is not staffed on weekends. Under store manager Kathi, the location relies on a volunteer team of 78 people to keep donated goods sorted, priced and moving through the sales floor, a level of community labour that underpins the entire operation and keeps prices low for shoppers.
What distinguishes the Kingston store, even among Mission Thrift Store’s dozens of Canadian locations, is the sheer volume it moves through in a given year. In 2024, the Kingston location processed more than 328,000 individual donated items and diverted upward of 144 tonnes of product from landfill, among the highest single year totals recorded across the chain’s Ontario stores. That figure alone offers a useful, quotable way to understand the store’s role in the city: Kingston residents donated and purchased enough secondhand goods through this one Princess Street storefront in a single year to keep well over a hundred tonnes of usable material out of the regional waste stream.
Mission Thrift Store is a faith-based, non-profit thrift retailer rather than a conventional department store chain, operating in a joint ministry partnership with Bible League Canada. Net proceeds from every purchase and every donation made at the Kingston store support ministry initiatives in more than fifty countries alongside more than five hundred local causes across Canada, ranging from food banks to women’s shelters. The organization began in 1989, when two Canadian businessmen returning from a Bible League Canada missions trip to India opened the first Bibles For Missions Thrift Store in Chilliwack, British Columbia; the network was rebranded Mission Thrift Store in 2017 as it expanded to more than fifty locations nationwide, and the Kingston store, open since 2009, has grown into one of the chain’s highest volume outposts in Eastern Ontario.
For anyone in Kingston hunting for a deal on furniture, clothing or household goods while wanting their spending and donations to fund something larger than a single transaction, Mission Thrift Store on Princess Street delivers both: a high volume, volunteer staffed secondhand shop that converted well over 300,000 donated items into affordable finds and measurable local and global impact in a single recent year.
