Well, the answer is yes, sometimes, but from a charity shop. However, I now have a huge pile of clothes in excellent conditions, mostly formal suits, that I never wore because I was too fat for them, and then became too thin for them.
I was just ready to go and donate them to a charity shop, actually, but my wife stopped me and now insists that we sell them.
We already had this conversation a couple of months ago, and at the time I told her “Go ahead and sell them, and you can keep the money”. She just stuck everything back in my wardrobe.
But her hoarding tendencies are another story. I genuinely don’t know if people buy second hand clothes from an individual. It seems so unlikely to me. What about parasites?
Parasites rarely buy anything, in my experience. People do, though – take a look at the classified ads in your local paper. If they’re anything like mine (come to think of it, are you still in the North East? It might actually be the same as mine) there are usually a few ads for clothing.
If you don’t want to bother with eBay, see if there are any consignment shops in your area. They sell the stuff for you & keep a small percentage. The clothes do need to be in good shape & not out of fashion. Don’t count on a huge amount of money.
Or you could give them to a charity without telling your wife. They are your clothes…
You could try to alter one of the suits and see if it would fit you. But if it was a inexpensive suit and it is no longer in fashion, I wouldn’t bother.
Consigment stores are your best bet. Or be a gent and donate them to Syrian fugitives now in the UK. They need men’s clothes badly.
If you’re willing to donate then, but she insists they should be sold…BUT she hasn’t actually taken any steps to do so then I say donate them!
I’m going to go ahead and guess these items have been hanging around, taking up space and entirely forgotten about, in the back of some cupboard, for ages. And wife WANTS to sell them, but has no follow through. You expect they’ll just end up back in the closet again, so I say, let it happen! Then, after a couple of weeks and while the wife is out, bundle them off to the nearest drop box and forget about it. She won’t notice, if at all, for ages and ages. You’ll be beyond indifferent by then. Conflict averted, goal achieved!
People buy used clothes all the time. Well, not typically underwear or socks, but other garments? Sure.
Either for budgetary considerations (because nice work clothing is expensive, and if you’re young or not flush with cash, finding it in a second-hand store is a godsend), or because they want it for some limited-time purpose and don’t want to shell out new clothing prices. Halloween costumes, rarely-occurring formal occasions, crafting, mid-point of diet regimen, etc.
If it were here, I’d contact the agencies and charities that help people get jobs after prison or other times when they don’t have “office clothes”. Those sorts of places are always looking for suitable clothing for people making a fresh job start.
I prefer used suits both because they’re cheaper than new suits, and because vintage (for certain definitions of “vintage”) suits are usually much better in cut, quality and material. But I prefer old-timey things, someone who is particularly fashion forward or else a businessman who is particularly conservative would rarely find used suits worthwhile. The trick is to find the right market, and ebay is your friend, there.
Of course, I hate ebay and paypal. Is there a UK version of Craigslist?
I’m in the US, so I can’t comment on the cultural part of this question. Lots of people buy used clothes and used suits here, but if the UK is particularly averse to buying used clothes, maybe still try and sell them on ebay, but be prepared to ship to the US.
I don’t get it. Why would they be willing to buy it from a thrift store but not from an individual? Also you could do a garage sale rather than finding someone else to sell them.
Easy answer: they’re cheap. Second hand clothing shops have proliferated around where I live (Boston), where the cost of living is phenomenally high. I shop at them for non-intimate apparel, have been doing so for a dozen years. Shortly after I began I visited my very wealthy globe-trotting cousins for Thanksgiving and my Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor only cousin told me how fabulous I looked :), flattered, I asked her if she wanted to know the price of everything I was wearing,–sweater, pants, shirt–and I said, truthfully, $7.95. She almost fainted :D. This has been a sort of private joke between us ever since, and in fact, wealthy as she is, she likes to bargain hunt, too (a New England thing, methinks)
Thanks! Don’t worry, I’ve already kept some clothes in case I balloon back to the old weight. These are formal suits that are really surplus to requirements - they really take too much space in my wardrobe to keep them all!
After talking it out with the wife, the plan now is to try and sell them on Gumtree (the UK equivalent of Craigslist, as ticker pointed out), donate a part of whatever we make to charity, then donate what clothes are left to charity shops.
