<p>TORONTO – When Amahl Arulanandam decided to get back into playing guitar in 2014, he turned to Kijiji.</p>
<p>The online classifieds site helped him score a Jackson guitar for $250 — a steep discount from the $600 he estimates it’s worth.</p>
<p>Since then, Arulanandam has bought three bicycles using Kijiji. The first turned out to be a dud, but that hasn’t deterred him.</p>
<p>“I make a reasonable amount of money but it’s not a regular, fixed income,” says the freelance musician.</p>
<p>“Anywhere that I can save money just to make sure that I’ll have a float for later on, in case I have a dry month, that’s always helpful.”</p>
<p>The second-hand economy — which includes everything from used goods stores to classified websites to online communities where users can trade goods — provides consumers with an opportunity to save money on their purchases or earn a little extra cash by selling stuff they no longer need.</p>
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<p>With the economy projected to grow at a tepid pace this year, some economists say the number of Canadians participating in this segment of the economy is likely to grow.</p>
<p>“In every downturn, there are always people that get harder hit that are looking for ways of trying to MacGyver a better quality of life with whatever they’ve got,” says Armine Yalnizyan, a senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.</p>
<p>“And it doesn’t always take money. You can spend less and live well, if you can figure out how to work with others who can trade stuff that you want.”</p>
<p>According to a report sponsored by Kijiji released earlier this week, roughly 85 per cent of Canadians took part in some form of second-hand transaction last year.</p>
<p>The report, which polled 5,990 people online, estimates that the second-hand economy contributes as much as $36 billion to Canada’s GDP.</p>
<p>The Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, the polling industry’s professional body, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.</p>
<p>While much of the second-hand economy involves purchasing goods outright, there is another component that doesn’t involve money changing hands at all.</p>
<p>In online bartering communities like <a href="http://bunz.com/" >Bunz Trading Zone</a>, popular amongst millennials, users swap their unwanted items for things that they need.</p>
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<p>Emily Bitze started the Toronto-based community in 2013 when she was working at a vintage shop and found herself so stretched one day that she couldn’t afford pasta sauce for her spaghetti.</p>
<p>“I lived paycheque to paycheque,” Bitze recalls. “There were often times where I couldn’t afford to actually buy food.”</p>
<p>Bitze decided to create a Facebook group where she could trade goods with her friends. Since then, the online community has swelled to more than 30,000 members, and Bitze recently launched a smartphone app. A countrywide expansion and a U.S. launch are in the works.</p>
<p>Lindsay Tedds, a co-author of the Kijiji study and a professor at the University of Victoria, says most transactions in the second-hand economy represent new economic activity — purchases that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. That means they aren’t detracting from economic growth.</p>
<p>However, in some instances consumers who would have bought new goods are turning to the second-hand economy instead — a phenomenon that can further fuel the cycle of slow economic growth, says Yalnizyan.</p>
<p>“If they’re buying used because it’s something they need and can’t afford it new, it will slow down the economy,” Yalnizyan says.</p>
<p>Bunz partner David Morton says that isn’t the millennial generation’s problem to solve.</p>
<p>“We’re going to let the economists sort that out,” says Morton.</p>
<p>“Whoever is to blame for the current economic situation — it’s not us. We’ve just entered the workforce. The people who have been working and voting and being a part of the system since before we were alive, they’re the ones who put us in this position. We’re just taking care of us.”</p>
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