Clothing by the Pound
A little while ago (over the summer?) I noticed a new store named Clothing by the Pound opened. Given that I developed a case of acute pantslessness a couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to visiting the store this week.
The store is located along the railroad tracks off of Duke just past Victoria. Their schtick is that they sell clothing by weight as opposed to pricing items individually. It works out to $4/lb + tax. The selection is pretty standard second-hand store fare, but I am pretty sure that this place is a for-profit organization, not a charity-based thrift shop. Among other things, I think the tax was a full 14%, which is not the case at other thrift stores I visit.
In practice, the price ends up being competitive with other thrift stores, and significantly cheaper than Value Village. I paid $9.74 for about 2lbs worth of clothes -- a pair of pants and two shirts. It's sometimes possible to do better on price, but I also was able to get nice-quality clothes (microfibre pants, a heavy cotton shirt) which are usually marked up more highly at other stores. I am not sure I would buy shoes or parkas or cinder blocks there, though.
Karmically speaking it's probably better to get clothes at a thrift shop. But I am not totally against for-profit ventures entering the second-hand market, and it has been hard to get men's clothes cheaply ever since the Salvation Army moved far away. Now that Generations has gone upscale and the new St. Vincent de Paul's has almost exclusively women's clothing, it's even harder.
(And yes, I realize that it is totally hypocritical to shop for secondhand goods while lamenting affluenza and the disposable society. What can I say? I'm a miser at heart.)
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Mood: clothed