> They are not a dumping ground...

They kind of are, and it's a role they seem to have embraced. In other words, a good % (50%+?) of the intake volume of clothes is not fit for secondary garment sale, and is instead sold "downstream" (in bulk) to tertiary markets ("poor countries", to use Bloomberg's parlance) and recycles to use as raw material. This is a source of revenue, too.

In other words, most thrift stores play an important role in the recycling chain. Otherwise, clothes would go into the garbage. After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic.

Agree. See NPR's story from 2013 "The Afterlife of American Clothes" https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/10/247362140/the-...

Right, the mentality of a lot of people is I'd feel bad putting this in the trash so I'll put in the donation bin and then all thinking about where it actually ends up is for someone else to deal with.

That's as it should be. Nobody should expect every person in the country to individually solve the problem of how best to allocate that resource. The donation bin is the correct solution, so that the resource can be graded, sorted, sold locally, or compressed into bales and sold internationally.

Only if it's profitable for the donatee. It's not right for me to just dump my trash on your lawn and call it a "gift".

When that someone is someone who specializes in dealing with the issue, passing it along to them makes a lot of sense.

I don't know the best way to recycle used clothes (for any definition of best). It is likely that a used-clothes donation center does. If that donation center can make a profit, even better.

What if they can't make a profit?

It's a particularly American approach to recycling to assume that the onus on sorting / separating should not fall on the individual generating the trash. Other countries don't take this approach - instead, they place a high premium on disposal costs of unsorted trash, and require that anything you try to recycle be carefully sorted.

This kind of runs counter to how the entire rest of modern civilization works, doesn't it? I don't have the foggiest idea how to grow grains, refine aluminum from bauxite, knit a sweater, build a water purifier, manufacture pens and pencils, bleach paper and bind it into spiral notebooks, raise livestock, or pick coffee beans, so I indirectly pay millions of people to do these things for me and focus on writing code. Why shouldn't I indirectly pay someone to sit at a conveyor belt and separate my recyclables? Single-stream recycling is a godsend, and it's annoying that I have to drive across town or find specific vendors to recycle textiles, batteries, electronics, and stuff like that.

The problem is you don't pay for someone to separate your recyclables. If we were all charged for the garbage we generate, and also for how expensive it was to process, then it'd be fine. But in most cases, consumers in the US don't pay truly variable rates for the garbage they generate. (Even in the generally progressive San Francisco, you're charged a monthly fee based simply on how many trash cans you have - so pretty much everyone pays the same, and there's little incentive to generate less trash.) https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/rates/

However, in our current scheme (at least in the US), when you don't sort your garbage, the cost of that is mostly just distributed across everyone else - both in terms of the cost to process the garbage, as well as the environmental costs of things like improperly disposed of batteries that end up in landfills.

There's efforts to automate the processing of mixed-stream recycling, but they're not widely available yet.

It's entirely possible that we'll see single stream recycling end here in the US soon, because the places we used to send it for processing (like China) no longer want to do it for us due to the environment problems. At that point, we'll either have to start doing a better job separating it ourselves, charge more for garbage and single-stream so we can pay for processing, or fill up our landfills even faster.

Or we'll realize that it's not cost-effective to recycle anything other than glass and metal and stop subsidizing plastic recycling at all. Glass and metal recycling wouldn't be any problem for single stream recycling because the value of recycled materials would make up for the cost of separation.

If we're going to subsidize forms of recycling that aren't cost-effective, I'd rather we subsidize forms of recycling that also aren't annoying to the end user. Forcing people to separate Plastic #1 from Plastic #5 when it's cheaper to just dump both plastics in a landfill in the first place strikes me as Kafkaesque.

You can't base recycling decisions only on what's "cost effective" while not considering revising the fees people pay to dispose of household. Generating trash isn't supposed to be inherently costless, and it really shouldn't be.

Even glass has become questionable in terms of recycling economics[0] based on current fees, partially because Americans generally fail to clean the containers properly.

"It's cheaper to dump it in a landfill" is frankly, a lame approach that ignores the environmental costs and short-sightedness of creating more landfills. Do you want to live on a landfill, or next to one? They're basically a toxic waste dump.

The obvious answer is to do what other countries do: charge a lot for disposal of non-recycleable/non-compostable garbage, charge much less for recycling properly (and that includes cleaning and sorting), and use the fees from the garbage to subsidize the cost of recycling. This results in 1) less waste in landfills 2) more recycling 3) less pollution and 4) less use of non-renewable resources.

[0] http://www.waste360.com/glass/focusing-economics-glass-recyc...

Doesn't this beget an economic feedback cycle? I.e., if it's more cost productive to send to a landfill, then more waste will be sent to a landfill, and so the costs to do so will go up as "demand" (waste) outstrips "supply" (landfill space). Then the cost effective pendulum swings back to recycling. Is that already happening?

In some ways, recycling should pay for itself. Consumers generate raw material for free, which through aggregation, sorting, and rectification (de-generating into raw-er materials) gains value for recyclers.

Depends how you define "cost productive". Cheaper on a cash basis, but that ignores the (not insignificant) externalities of doing that, such as landfill remediation down the road, and increased cost of transporting other trash to more distant landfill sites.

It's easy to say recycling should "pay for itself" but if you're going to do that, you need to consider the entire economic picture, not just how much value is generated from the recovered goods. There's also landfill savings, protection of the environment, reduced usage of energy (both in disposal and generation of new materials), etc. Given all of those, it can be entirely rational for a government to subsidize recycling heavily, because the overall impact is still "cost effective."

Maybe the place I volunteered at is weird but we did just throw those clothes into the garbage.

What a waste.

that's true, recycled denim makes for great insulation apparently https://www.homedepot.com/p/UltraTouch-16-in-x-48-in-Denim-I...

I think a lot of the fill in punching bags is some sort of garbled/blended fabrics of some mixed variety.

The North Beach branch of the San Francisco Public Library actually uses denim as insulating material within their walls.

http://sfpublicworks.org/project/north-beach-branch-library

"...and 11,350 square feet of insulation made from recycled denim, equating to approximately 4,500 pairs of jeans."

That's a lot of jeans!

It's kinda important to build with less flamable materials whenever possible.

A library, by definition, is full of flammable materials anyway :)

I remember this dude putting a bunch of materials to the test with a direct blowtorch flame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NC79e0oztM. I was hoping he had a demo of denim; it's mentioned in the video description, but skimming the video I couldn't locate it in a reasonable time. You can look at his demo on treated cellulose around 1:48

Denim Batt at 12:39

https://youtu.be/8NC79e0oztM?t=12m39s

bummer ><, I was hoping it would perform a lot better. The brief coverage of the poor performers explains why I couldn't skim it and land on it. Only the strong contenders had long enough coverage to skim with a mouse hover over the timeline and spot them in the thumbnail. Sounds like it was trading on low allergic response vs flammability according to his commentary.

I imagine it was sprayed with a flame retardant?

Fabrics used for insulation are treated with flame retardant.

People also insulate with cellulose -- ground up newspaper. It is treated with boron to make it flame retardant.

Old clothes make excellent raw material for the production of shop rags. They can also be used to make high quality paper.

plus all those sketchy stuffed animals, when they run out of oily rags and newspaper!

(regarding the denim sound insulation and fire)

Maybe, but there's a pretty good chance it's treated with flame retardants before use, and cotton fabric generally doesn't really burn that well - or at least not fast.

There's a reason people working with hot glass wear long cotton shirts/pants for it.

I had a chemistry professor mention to the class she always travels with natural fabrics, cotton and the like, whenever she's onboard a flight. She mentioned something along the lines of it increases your chances of survival if ever there's a fire because synthetics melt and stick to your skin and burn like crazy.

I took some glassblowing classes and the first day safety lecture included a bit about this. Eye protection, closed toe shoes, and cotton clothes, precisely for this reason.

Especially when we were first learning, it was easier than you might think to spill or splash 2000F liquid glass on the ground when gathering it out of the crucible, and that'd turn synthetic clothes into napalm.

That's an ... interesting failure of statistical thinking. Fire in the cabin is by far less risky than many other potential harms he encounters en route to the airport.

Assuming your clothes fit properly, your choice of clothing will have little effect on your chances of surviving your journey to the airport. However, clothing that might help you survive a plane crash will likely have the same benefit in a car crash.

I used the term fire loosely, it was basically a plane crash and subsequent fire, an inferno in other words not a small camp fire around the center aisle seat.

>After all, I can't put them in the green recycling bin with my cans, jars, and plastic.

Depends, in SF you now can now put unfit fabrics in the blue bin[1]. For usable, they suggest place like USAgain.

[1]https://www.recology.com/recology_news/sf-accepts-new-recycl...

Actually, if they're really ruined, most recyclers will take them with the paper recycling.

Really? Even in Germany where a ton of things go in household recycling bins (including basically all plastics and composites), you'd have to bring ruined clothes to the recycling center separately. Definitely only paper/cardboard in the paper bin.

Where I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away.

They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc

In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

> as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

And for sofas that aren't in unsalvagable condition there are furniture recycling projects around the country that will collect old furniture, give it a bit of a sprucing up, and sell it.

Yes indeed. These were perfectly good ones but the furniture salvage people locally didn’t want them and no one came on gumtree or freecycle :(

Ah, that's a shame.

Or Craigslist 'Free Stuff'.

I'd rather throw it away than deal with the flakes on Craigslist. It rains here so leaving it on the curb will only ensure it loses whatever residual value it might have held.

In many places in US you don't have separate bins for paper, plastics, glass and what not, but only one (usually green) recycling bin for everything that is somehow recyclable.

In Japan, I think there were like ten bins, with clear instructions on how each should be used (eg take the label off the plastic bottle before binning it). It was a bit stressful before I got used to it.

Here in Seattle, at least, recycling has transitioned to blue and green is now used for municipal compost bins. I think SF is the same.

We (Seattle) used to have separate bins in the late 90's or early 00's. A lot smaller total volume than the 96 gal toters, though.

I remember that as a kid in general King county (many of the suburbs of Seattle).

However it's still not enough.

    * More bins for more specific TYPES of plastic
    * Better, machine readable, (BIG) labels
    * Financial incentives (carrot and stick)

I'll elaborate more on that last point. Restaurants should be encouraged to create takeout packaging that is more easily recycled and/or composted. Similarly wrappers, boxes, cups and packets should have a per unit tax for non-environmentally friendly units.

There should also be a push towards the use of glass and metal and paper over plastics. Sturdy glass bottles can be cleaned, thermal blast smoothed and re-used or broken down and recycled completely. Similarly metal lids and cans can also attain a new life with ease.

There's always tradeoffs. If you require people sort at home, more recyclables end up in the trash and/or people missort anyway.

I agree we should incentivize use of more recyclable materials (in place of non-recyclable or more expensive to recycle materials) in general.

Blue in LA as well.

Where "everything" may be limited. For example, I just went and looked: I can recycle "recyclable glass, aluminum, cans, plastics and paper".

At least where I lived in Germany, in cities, there were dumpster-sized stand-alone donation bins labeled "Kleidung und Schuhe" (clothing and shoes) everywhere.

It's often far less convenient to get to a recycling center in the US (especially for people without a car) so they do more of their own sorting.

I wasn't going to share a link to a barely related discussion from last month, but:

Recycling Chaos in U.S. As China Bans 'Foreign Waste' | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827

... China doesn't want recycling anymore!

I've never heard of this, and have heard a presentation on how paper recycling works that makes me kinda doubt it.

Knowing something about how paper making works, I'm not at all surprised by the idea; since part recycling is going to have reduce everything to fibers anyway, I'm not sure why including clothes which you could use as feedstock to make paper would necessarily be functionally any different to the recycler than reducing those clothes to fibers, combining those with other fiber sources, making paper out of that, and then putting the resulting paper into the recycling.

I loved this article on making paper for U.S. currency, which is produced by one company out of cotton and linen. Up until very recently, the company used denim as a source of raw material.

> "But recently, Americans decided they liked jeans that stretched, so jeans companies began adding spandex to their fabric. Money with spandex in it wouldn't be money anymore, which means much of Crane's time is now spent on a global search for waste cotton that wasn't used to make elastic pants."

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24292/benjamin-hundred...

"Before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper#Fiber_sources

What country are you in? It's technically illegal in New York to put anything but PAPER in the cardboard bin.

...is cardboard counted as paper?

My girlfriend goes shopping at a thrift store and she finds top-notch women's clothing there which looks it has been used only a few times, if at all. Unfortunately men seem to wear their stuff longer so I have never found anything good in the men's section.

To grossly overgeneralize, most men aren't as inclined as many women to get rid of clothing just because they're tired of it after wearing it a few times. Sure, I buy things that I decide aren't as comfortable or look as good as I thought they would be--and I'll donate them. And then there are the copious piles of giveaways I seem to end up with in spite of my best efforts. But by and large, I'm probably fairly typical in that I keep most things until they're stained or worn out. (And sometimes even then if I really like them :-))

> To grossly overgeneralize, most men aren't as inclined as many women to get rid of clothing just because they're tired of it after wearing it a few times.

I don't even think that's an overgeneralization.

I wouldn't be surprised if studies and stats show that men buy less clothes and reuse existing clothes more often than women, as verified by the fashion market size.

If I go to my local mall which has a mixture of high and middle end in the world, I might find a handful of stores which sell only men's clothes, but they are both rare and tiny. In comparison, the stores which sell only women's clothes are extremely common and take up a huge portion of the mall.

Furthermore, it's rare for me to see a women's only brand also sell men's clothes, but invariably nearly every men's only brand I know of eventually expands into women's.

I own three sets of casual clothes (jeans, t-shirts, nice shirts), one suit, one pair of black dress shoes, one pair of tan boots and a pair of hiking boots.

All the clothes I own would fit in a single bin bag, I can nearly wash everything in one wash cycle.

Just never seen the point in more, I buy good stuff that lasts and that's about iy.

This implies to me that you never do anything besides walk from your air-conditioned home, to your air-conditioned transportation, to your air-conditioned destination.

Hobbies sometimes benefit from different clothing - playing sports, hiking activities, water activities, layers for UV protection or heat insulation, 'work' clothes for getting dirty in a garden or painting a house, etc.

I could admittedly get rid of a lot of clothing that I rarely if ever use or could readily substitute something else for. But I still probably have a dozen different pieces of footwear I need for different purposes and a closet worth of clothing that I genuinely use on a regular basis for work, around the house, and hiking/watersports/skiing/other activities across multiple seasons from sub-zero to nineties F temperatures.

I live in the North of England, Air Conditioning isn't a thing here and I don't drive or use public transport (I live a 15 minute walk away from work).

I do have some cycling gear but that's specifically cycling gear.

> I live in the North of England, Air Conditioning isn't a thing here and I don't drive or use public transport (I live a 15 minute walk away from work).

Ok, it sounds like I was pretty close.

You sometimes cycle but otherwise don't have any hobbies which would benefit from specific clothing and your climate seems moderate enough that you can get by with 3 shirts. I admire the simplicity!

I discovered that moving country is a great way to figure out what clothing you actually wear.

All my clothing now fits into a single army surplus duffle bag.

Apparently you live in a stable climate (or are immune to weather changes somehow).

In my part of the world men's clothing always seems to be several times the cost of comparable women's clothing. This may also have something to do with it.

You can get Kirkland brand men’s khakis at Costco for $20. Decent polos can be had for < $10 from JC Penny. Anyway, that’s what I wear, and they are good until the wife complains about the holes, and then some.

I keep telling her I’ll someday fit into that favorite heavy metal T-shirt from high school; don’t throw it out.

Seriously? What part of the world is this? Are you talking about formal wear?

Fashionable looking clothes for men in I would say Northern Europe is relatively expensive... because people buy brand names.

Jeans, t-shirts the likes... 200-300 USD for a pair of jeans is quite common (above also exists). You can get dirty cheap, but men are stupid (me included) -- and to be fair the quality is pretty decent.

I don't really shop in the US, because quality sucks.

So what does a pair of high quality women's jeans cost in Northern Europe?

I looked very hard for the article I read recently about a woman (in US) who just straight up stopped buying clothes gendered for women because they fell apart immediately. I am extremely curious whether there is a similar cost/construction problem in Europe.

Can't say I know much about womens clothing, but there a wider selection of less expensive fashionable clothes.. Like H&M, which I'm sure also compromises on quality.

Obviously, women can also get highend, quality stuff. But for men it's either highend or the supermarket, there's few things in between.

In the US my experience is that high-end stuff is being VERY high-end, and low end is becoming very low end... likely as a result of incoming inequality.

Fascinating, thank you for the extra breadcrumbs. I think the mental model has to include something about mass produced vs bespoke, not just high/low fashion.

In the US, the easiest example to take is the three tiers of fashion produced by Old Navy, The Gap, and Banana Republic. As far as I'm aware, it's always been the same ownership, but each brand is clearly marketed to different price ranges. And also as far as I'm aware: all three brands use offshore sweatshop labor. Right now, rough prices for jeans:

Old Navy: starting at 25USD The Gap: 40-60USD and up. Banana: starting at 120USD

If I had to pay 200-300USD for one pair of denim jeans, I would make damn sure it's because it was machined by a highly paid local artisan. (I don't really care that they're local. I'd still have to think about the cotton sourcing, I guess. Everything about the supply chain is problematic.)

You're right that income inequality is shaping the market, but I think the reverse is true too. The only go-to-market strategies anyone seems to use are: 1. dominate the market with razor thin margins (or even at an initial loss), 2. well differentiated luxury products at outrageous margins. Changing the subject from cloth, Apple is the only company that doesn't seem to operate barely above margins for their low-end products. But of course they benefit from fierce competition on margin with their suppliers. And electronics recycling is a lot more profitable than clothing recycling. I don't know, I guess I was never talking about clothes anyway, and always talking about Late Capitalism.

Really, I've never observed this. If anything women need more variety and clothing tends to be more expensive. Formal wear comes in all price points for both men and women, as does casual clothing.

This is doubly true if you're buying button-down shirts, because if you're not one of a handful of exact anatomical sizes you've got to have things altered after purchase if you want them to fit well.

Men's button down shirts are generally sized in 3 dimensions - collar, sleeve and fit (slim / normal)... which is more axes than most clothing items. If you're only seeing a handful of sizes, find a different brand.

Unless you're trying to buy a flannel. Then it's small medium large.

You can get custom sized flannels too, I'm wearing one right now. Just have to look around or pay more but it's worth it if you're a fringe size. (I'm tall.) I get mine from Trumaker.

People buy me a lot of cloth that I never wear, because I find them uncomfortable. Either they don't fit or are uncomfortable, impractical or I dislike how they look. By a lot, I mean I get them multiple times per year (birthday, christmas). People don't seem to gift as much to guys.

I had also multiple times had to buy something so that I wear something appropriate (for wedding, job interview, classical dancing or other official occasion) and when similar occasion happened again, they did not fit anymore. Guys can do with same official outfit for all these occasions.

For men, ties used to be the utterly stereotypical gift that everyone gave when you didn't know what to give someone. So men ended up with closets full of the things, half of which they hated. (I've donated a lot of mine and I can still say, with considerable certainty, that I could wear a different tie on every occasion I wear a tie for the rest of my life and I wouldn't run out.)

I'll second this. If you live next to a 'nice area' like in West LA, the Richmond, Walnut Creek, etc. then the local Good Will is a Goldmine for good quality women's clothes. It will all be a season out of date, but the clothes have been worn maybe once or twice by some super-rich person and they are easily 99.9% off. For best results, go the week after a Fashion Week in Milan or NYC, when 'last season' is now official.

Good luck finding any men's clothing if you wear size small or even medium. It seems to be 99% L and XL. Same holds true even for stores like TJ Maxx.

Not true in Europe at least, I seem to observe all sizes on racks

I've switched to exclusively wearing Brooks Brothers shirts from my local thrift store. They seem to survive to donation, being somewhat higher quality. I also find good winter dress coats and decent suits on a regular basis. It's there, though I'll grant that I might end up digging a little more to find it.

For those who question the value of rummaging through the riff raff at their local thrift shop, I refer them to this: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/found-vintage-lecoultre-de...

Jeans and shirts are pretty much a lost cause. Every now and again you can get really lucky on formal wear. Example: Last spring I found a ~$1000 cashmere overcoat in my size at one of the local thrift stores for $20.

I don't have the skills to distinguish a 1000 dollar coat form a 20 dollar coat so even if I found one I wouldn't recognize it :(

Neither do I. I saw the coat, liked it, confirmed it was my size, and bought it. On a whim I googled the brand when I got home. Point is, you typically have a better chance of scoring dressier stuff at the thrift store because it doesn't get beat to hell.

"they are not a dumping ground for all of your dead relatives clothes"

What's so bad about dead peoples clothes? I used to buy lots of clothes at estate sales and I still have a few overcoats from them. I have a barely worn leather jacket and camel skin coat that I bought for a few dollars each, plus maybe 10-20 for dry cleaning. Women would buy clothes at these sales so dresses and women's coats would be more expensive, but for some reason I was the only one purchasing men's clothes. These coats have lasted me much longer than new coats that I buy from stores because fashion today is so disposable.

Nothing is wrong with some of them. Frequently though we would get donations where someone had stripped everything off hangers and out of dressers, thrown it in trashbags and hauled it all in. Much of the clothing is unusable due to wear, almost zero of it is still in fashion and sometimes you get stuff no one will ever buy - used grandma underwear, stains and all (you'd be surprised how common it was.) The stuff you bought sounds nice and should be donated, I'm just saying that people should use a little of their own discretion.

"Discretion" is just not going to happen when it comes to estate donations. People are already feeling a huge loss, and the last thing they want is to feel that the decedent's possessions are also now just trash.

I'm here to make it happen! (if only in a very small way) I'd say that people feeling a huge loss may want to reconsider whether they want volunteering strangers and probationers looking at their relative's undergarments, judging them by how many of their clothes are moth-eaten, how big their pants are, etc. Having done it I can tell you when my parents pass away, I will be donating a few select articles of clothing and trashing the rest.

Some but not all.

I haven't worked in a thrift store, so maybe you can fill me in on something:

It seems like there are "scalpers" (can't think of another word for them) who semi-professionally go through thrift stores buying up the good things, and then reselling them on ebay. I've definitely seen this with sports equipment.

(My fiance and I like going to thrift stores looking for art project supplies, and I always look over the golf clubs seeing if there is anything interesting in there [I am actually a golfer]).

>It seems like there are "scalpers" (can't think of another word for them) who semi-professionally go through thrift stores buying up the good things, and then reselling them on ebay.

sounds like arbitrage to me.

'Flipping'/'flippers' is another term commonly used

Same thing with used book stores. Basically just exploiting arbitrage opportunity in the inefficient used clothing market. Unless you pay people to price things more accurately or can identify the resellers reliably this seems difficult to combat.

If you can price things accurately yourself the resellers won't have arbitrage opportunities and you'll make more money. And if you can't price things accurately yourself you'll gain nothing by excluding arbitraging resellers, so I don't see why they're worth trying to exclude.

I used to go to a local book reseller hoping to find a deal, a book worth more than fifty cents. Its kinda fun, they could always lure me in for an hour and I always left with extra stuff... sell the sizzle not the steak. In the long run if they "lost" ten dollars on one nice book that they underpriced for me, I probably bought five pieces of junk for two bucks each that aren't actually worth anything so they at least break even (or probably better). As long as the cost of perfect pricing is higher than the profit off moving some impulse purchase trash... This sets a very tight constraint for how much you spend as a business owner on perfect pricing.

Then again, for a homeless person who brings net negative value to the business bu being there and their time is worth $0/hr... you can't pay a clerk $11/hr or $15/hr or whatever the new minimum wage demand is, if you're competing against homeless who repel the regular clientele.

They're one of the many resellers on Amazon now; there's no point in visiting their local store anymore, because anything worth more than the fuel value of burning it is being diverted to Amazon so by definition the store has nothing left in it that's worth reading. Its also faster and easier and better selection to find anything worth reading on Amazon rather than going to the store. They're trying to branch out into selling weird trinkets kinda like how Barnes and Noble is less than 50% books. In the long run they're on the downward slope of all retail to sell only urgent convenience store swill and spontaneous gifts.

Accurately is a misleading word. It depends on what your goals are. Maybe you prefer to make a bit less profit so that people can read more, as a public service. Or maybe you're just using those books to attract people into the store.

Finally, the scanners don't know if you can price "accurately", so if you can, they're just occupying space and blocking ways for no benefit to anyone.

All thrift stores I know of and have donated to exist to raise money for a charity. They should be thrilled to move stock. But the vast majority of books are next to worthless, so your "read more" crowd will have plenty of options, and won't care that some rare first edition got picked up for premium pricing.

If scanners don't find anything to resell (because you've already scanned and correctly priced, or even listed online yourself), they'll leave soon enough.

I assumed they felt that the thrift store was basically a charity helping the less fortunate buy clothes for a discounted price and that resellers buying all the decent stuff was taking away from the needy.

I meant the used book store case. I have a hard time thinking of used books with high resale value that the needy need. Maybe they exist. Valuable used books are generally out of print due to low sales. Or they're specialty books that weren't ever printed/read in large numbers. I'm happy that I got some expensive-on-Amazon old books from the free giveaway shelf of a technical library, but I don't think the needy are often looking for Opioid Analgesics: Chemistry and Receptors in the first place.

Used bookshops used to be plagued by 'scanners,' people who would come in with internet-connected UPC guns and scan every single item to see if they found something they could sell for more online.

I don't know if it's still a thing though. It was painfully irritating when they'd do it in the library.

Oh, to be plagued by people showing you a zero-barrier-to-entry method to increase your revenue. The absolute rascals.

Partner worked in two s/h bookshops OZ/UK. The painful part is when they are amateur, and don't deal fairly with you over your own stocking and shelving policies. Leaving a trail of badly re-shelved books behind is trashing your farm. The good part is that you wise up and realize you have to do more input work on your stock to price it, if you don't want to become part of the wholesale chain. Or, learn to live with it and accept a different profit model.

Now me, as a customer? I walked out of one shop here in brisbane when I found a treasure (architects drawings from pugins practice, neoclassical sketches of British buildings) and they refused to honour the written price which was (I acknowledge) undervaluing the book, but none the less reflected what somebody had thought the book was worth, righ up until I decided to buy it. Yes, this is strictly illegal. its also impossible to police in practice. I should have reported them, I just decided never to shop there again.

Ex seller of huge numbers of books (we're kindle now. books are dirty and feed roaches in the tropics) -I salt the valuable ones in amongst the trash, because I want you, the book buyer, to buy the box not the ones you want of high worth. There have to be a lot of high worth books, to make it worth my time to sort them out, and I'm left with the remove-the-trash problem I was motivated with in the first place.

This is the deal: you buy all my books and I accept I get less than high water mark price for the jewels, but I do get my shelves emptied.

"Flippers" would be the term you're looking for.

I actually got all of my "nice" clothes at thrift stores. Since you can get clothes there for $5-6 from brands that cost... well, drastically more than I'm willing to spend on clothes. The nicest clothes I wear are the cheapest clothes I ever bought.

I agree. I have a few used sportcoats and overcoats from high-end manufacturers that I bought for pennies on the dollar. They are good-to-great quality, and thanks to "timeless" men's fashion, are still in style.

You have to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, though. Unless the source is an estate sale, donated pants are almost always at the end-of-life and shoes are always a joke.

Here we have Consignment stores which work a little differently. The "donor" and the shop split the proceeds from the sale. Things start at a higher price that is still a good deal, maybe 1/3 of retail, and then the price falls on a weekly schedule. The shops are picky about what they'll take, but the selection is usually great. Also, it might sound weird, but the clothes tend to be of better quality because they're the ones that stood up to a couple of washings (stuff that just falls apart never makes it there).

Myself, and pretty much everyone I know buys rags in bulk from thrift stores. They make money off the crappy worn clothes and I get cheap and plentiful rags.

Out of style clothes in good shape seems to be the worst issue for thrift stores. Once the crappy clothes are turned into rags and the modern/stylish good clothes are sold, you're left with racks and racks of out of style/out of date clothes no on wants which is why it was donated in the first place.

What are you doing that eats up so many rags? I have a clothing downgrade cycle that goes from work, to yard work, to rags, and it keeps me adequately supplied, especially when supplemented by occasional worn-out linens.

Work on old engines, the oil, grease, dust, grime, soot, and the rest of stuff that accumulates means lots of rags.

I used to work at a power plant, and we would go through a pallet-sized box of rags every week or two. Grease, especially, eats them up

I'm curious what industrial facilities do with their used dirty rags. Can they be recycled or are they considered toxic waste?

We threw them on the belt that fed into the boiler.

Cleaning. You can replace most uses of paper towels with rags.

Having toured a Goodwill facility once, I was pretty impressed with the process for dealing with "garbage". They seem to have a fantastic process for squeezing every bit of value out of it before sending it to the landfill. Obviously, this won't be the case for smaller thrift stores.

> If you have clothing which you could still wear but don't want/don't fit in anymore then consider donating.

But please only to local homeless shelters/refugee assistance organizations, and only after checking if they actually accept the kind/size of clothes you want to bring, as most of them only have limited space. This is also valid for stuff like sleeping bags or food.

The "donation boxes" you see all over the streets in Germany (or those at charity organizations) are in fact often the worst of the worst - the charity organization may get money, yes, but the price of that money is the total and utter destruction of African textile industry. The "creme" aka first-class clothes goes to second-hand stores, the not-so-fine-anymore goes to Eastern Europe and the rest goes to Africa... and for local dealers it's hard to compete. Of course, the trade creates jobs, but the price of the countries not being able to produce anything locally and making them totally dependent on donations is enormous.

Sounds like a relevant piece of information to me. Have you got any pointers/sources for this?

> Have you got any pointers/sources for this?

For the African exports, sure - "mitumba" is the African word for "donated" clothing. If you speak German, public TV station ARD has a documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djXkFedpTrE (and newspaper Zeit has a short text, based on that documentation: http://web.archive.org/web/20120822083146/www.zeit.de/2011/4...)

For homeless/refugees: at least this is what the Munich organizations regularly state within their calls (and especially during fall of 2015, where people brought in way too much stuff for the refugees and there were severe shortages of space and sorting manpower). Besides, asking someone if he can use donations before getting on the road is always better ;)

The local homeless shelter here doesn't accept coats.

One of the things I loved about America (at least Sacramento) was the thrift stores! In the UK we have to go to charity stores if we want second hand stuff (usually), and they're mostly quite small.

In American the store was huge and sold so many different things, I spent at least an hour or so wandering around!

I used to buy my work clothes when I was younger from a local thrift shop called 'Savers'. At the time I was working as a welder in a factory, and being able to get used jeans/work-pants for $2-3 a piece really helped out. I'd wear them out after about a week(lots of hot debris burns holes in them), and couldn't afford to buy new clothes constantly.

Having worked in a couple thrift stores I concur. Only give clothes in good condition. If it's faded, stained, or holey just throw it out because that's what Goodwill is going to do and instead of helping them, you're costing them money (in labor).

Your experience with Goodwill is pretty much the opposite of mine.

Goodwill (supposedly) provides important job skills training, including for many immigrants and refugees.

In Seattle they specifically instruct everyone to give your worn out holey socks and underwear to Goodwill and DO NOT put them in the garbage.

If the clothes are good enough to be used by a for-profit thrift store, they can be used by a non-profit.

The problem is the clothes that no one wants and end up in the landfill, and thrift stores don't fix it.

I don't know, good big & tall clothes are hard to come by, especially for a reasonable price. You don't get too many choices locally (JCPenney, Meijer for shirts, and a specialized Big & Tall shop that charges way more than I'd like is all that I know around me).

I appreciated that there were actually clothes my size at thrift stores, but even at thrift stores there isn't a huge selection of them. Do they really not sell that much at thrift stores?

There's also an argument to be made that people are over-claiming tax deductions for used clothing that becomes scraps for pennies.

Poor people don't itemize. Even fewer with the new tax legislation.

I'll take people getting a few extra bucks back from taxes for scraps vs. religious donations that offer no benefit to general society. Thrift stores offer employment opportunities to the disabled and ex-convicts, and provide an option for those that can't afford to buy new.

There is always a place that will take old clothes, even if they are worn out. They are "binned" somewhat like CPUs. The ultimate destination for the lowest quality textiles is places that sanitize them and sell them to institutions and such as rags for cleaning.

If all else fails they are shredded and made into painter mats, industrial rags or even sound proofing panels.

It's also a tax write off :)