I was walking through a store today that had a clearance sale on most of their clothes. That’s when this question popped up in my head. What do the stores do to get rid of their old clothes or merchandise after they had a huge clearance sale? Do they give it to charity? Or do they throw them away? Or do they give it to other stores to sell?
I worked at a retail store in HS that donated them to a local charity. They would cut the tags out beforehand, and we were instructed to not take any clothing with the tags cut out as returns or exchanges for that reason.
Prior to that, I worked in an outlet store (changed from surplus store shortly after I started) that sold overstock merchandise from the retail stores, factory seconds and merchandise with minor flaws/damage. From what I can tell, that’s not how most “outlet stores” get stock anymore.
“We’re gonna have lawyers here. It’ll be a fun time.”
–R.R.S.
I work for some thrift shops and I don’t see any big stores giving us their extras very often. Last we got was about 20 pairs of shoes.
Sometimes they take the clothes that can’t be sold and put them in one of their clearance stores cheap. Or put them in an Outlet store with a price tag that says ‘Compare At:.’ Which is, suffice to say, a meaningless phrase that has no reference to the items being sold anywhere else. That’s what they said on some news program.
My mom and I went to one of those clearance stores recently and I didn’t see anything I liked in the clothes, so I wandered back to shoes. They were all in boxes with tags, and I saw a pair I liked and pulled them out, and sho 'nuff they had been used. They had markings and scuffs on the bottom that could only have been made by street wear. Then my mom called me over to a skirt she had found that had clearly been hand-hemmed.
Now I’m not a snob that won’t buy second-hand clothes, I love thrift stores and yard sales, but it really burned me up that they were trying to pass off what seemed to be returned merchandies as new.