Hot This Season: Last Season

I visited a thrift shop this afternoon to do some clothes shopping.

I'd been feeling that I could use a few more items of clothing suitable for wearing to work, and I found four pairs of pants and two shirts for $40. A fair price for used clothes in Boston, and a fabulous one compared to retail (I found a pair of pants that apparently was meant to retail at $248, multiply marked down and eventually thrift-shopped and purchased by me for $11), plus I get to give some deserving garments a good home and support the worthy mission of Goodwill in general.

I have concluded that there's pretty much no reason to ever buy any clothing retail.

Well, maybe undergarments. One kind of likes to feel that those are new, even though one knows rationally that there's no reason a secondhand pair of underpants, properly laundered, would not be perfectly serviceable, and just as clean as some pair of newly-manufactured underpants that might have fallen on the floor in the factory or something.

It seems weird, though, just the idea of wearing used undergarments. Ew!

My guess is that your overanxious brain leaps to the conclusion that, technically, having your naughty bits next to a piece of cloth that was once next to some stranger's naughty bits means you might as well be having sex with that person. And your brain is concerned that you don't know where that stranger's naughty bits have been, or whether that stranger is attractive enough to be worth sharing your genetic legacy with, so be careful.

Your brain does not seem to be familiar with the concept of washing machines.

Anyway, undergarments aside, I decided that I want to buy pretty much everything used, and I've been doing reasonably well at it. Save money! Save perfectly good garments from being wasted! It's a world of awesome.

Plus, this way if it turns out the clothes were sewed by underpaid children or any of the other horrible labor practices you seem to keep hearing about, at least I can feel that I didn't personally give money to a company that made that happen.

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