GoKawiilWhen it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge.
I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in the form of resellers who stalk Goodwill and remove everything priced below the pareto frontier to resell online, where you can’t try them on before buying. Goodwill has also gotten better about assessing their prices, and will no longer treat new cashmere and ratty fleece as the same category.
But the market has only become efficient in the sense of removing easy bargains. It is still trivial to pay a lot of money for shitty clothes. So I turned to reddit and shoggoths, to learn about clothing quality and where the bargains are. This is what I learned. It’s from the POV of a woman buying sweaters and coats, but I expect a lot of the information to be generally applicable.
General money saving tricks
When shopping online, put an item in your cart, checkout enough to give them your email address, but don’t confirm the purchase. You will almost always get a reminder email with a discount. If this doesn’t work the shop is either very high end, or Amazon. It sometimes works with individual sellers on platforms like ebay and etsy. . You can use the wait as a cooling off period where you decide if you really want something.
Most sales are fake. Real sales happen at the end of the season, when whatever you buy won’t be useful for another 9 months, if you have the misfortune to live somewhere with weather. Saving money through sales is like persistence hunting, which I find boring and stressful so I didn’t look into this much. But if you prefer it to thriting, I’m sure reddit will explain how to optimize.
Every store will offer you a coupon the second you load the site. They don’t want much, just your email address. I ignore this, and then if I decide to buy something I revisit the site in incognito mode to get the discount
Discounters
I briefly thought that even if proper thrift stores no longer worked, discounters like Marshall’s did. Officially these work by buying overstock from proper stores and reselling it at markdown, so if you don’t care about being behind trend it’s a big leap forward in the cost-quality trade off. Unfortunately, this is mostly a lie. Marshalls and TJ Maxx primarily sell items that were produced with the intention to be sold at their store, either under some brand they made up or licensing a luxury brand while not replicating the brand’s quality (legal bootlegs). Ross Dress for Less does this less but still a lot.
You can spot this at Marshall’s by looking at the ID number on the tag- ending in 1 means it was produced for Marshall’s, 2 means genuine overstock. You can also use the RN number on the sewn-in tag to check the manufacturer. My expensive-by-my-standards winter coat had every appearance of being genuine overstock, down to a tag from another store listing a price 3 times Marshall’s price, but turned out to be bootleg.
... continue reading