It depends on what I’m shopping for and what I intend to do with it. For clothing, since I work long hours as a welder, I buy cheap 100% cotton long sleeve shirts at thrift stores. They’re all going to get burned up over time, so their design, color, and/or logo doesn’t matter in the slightest. Cheap and disposable is the goal there.
Sometimes I’ll shop at thrift stores for specific types of electronics or metals not for what their intended function is, but rather for what I can turn it into or use it for. I once bought a thin wall steel pot, cut it up, flattened it out, and I now cut pieces off to fix other things.
The last thing I fixed with it was a gash in a dryer drum. I cut the damaged section of the drum out, drew an outline on the flattened steel pot, cut it out, rolled it a little, and TIG welded it into the missing section of the drum.