A rant triggered by sticker shock in vintage stores. Yesterday I went on a bit of a trip across town to a famous local comic shop called The Beguiling. They are owned by the guys who founded the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and although they've divested from running it (amid some small controversy of favouritism/poor management/slack addressing of abuses) they're still pretty tied into it. They're also pretty tied into the local zine/indie comics scene in general and at TCAF I pre-ordered a set of comics/zines/manga from previous TCAFs as well as the most recent one, featuring a special doujinshi by Battan called Golden Fly. If you like your manga full of lush lesbians, you might be interested in her work. I wanted the full set of doujinshi in particular so that I could get Carmen by est em, another small-print-run doujinshi released for TCAF. I have a signed print by est em framed (although not on my actual walls) but I don't know if I ever got this -- and if I did, it's in storage and not catalogued in my LibraryThing so I can't find it easily. This is the kind of thing I used to buy a lot of to collect -- indie comics and zines, things with small print runs that probably won't ever get published again. Because this is out of my usual zone of travel I made a bit of a trip of it and walked through Kensington Market on the way there. Kensington Market is one of those neighbourhoods that is often recommended to tourists because it has Character ™. It's a lot of low rise houses and buildings that have been converted to bougie restaurants and is especially known for its concentration of vintage clothing stores. Back when hipsters were a real thing, this was the epicentre of hipsterdom. Of course it has gentrified like everything else in this city and now the people who own shops there complain about homeless people setting up stalls on the sidewalk and scaring away / stealing their business. Going through there really sets up a stark divide between artsy people who want to look poor and bohemian and the people who are actually struggling. Something I have perhaps inherited from my mother's side of the family is the love of a bargain and sorting through second hand stuff. But when I have money I'll largely be buying things new because I can afford to. It's not having money that has had me shopping weekly at the local charity shop. For about four or five years pretty much all the clothes and shoes I owned were either from there or had been bought many years before. While I have bolstered my wardrobe a bit since getting this new job, still the majority of my closet is second hand or clearance rack and not by choice. And even this charity shop has changed to become more expensive and more trendy since I started going there in 2019. All the aunties who worked there originally are gone and now it's all young people between 18-25 (guessing) -- except of course the volunteers they get to work in the back of the shop sorting and cleaning stuff. They rearrange the store seemingly weekly and it drives me absolutely bananas. How many ways can you organize shirts? The answer may surprise you! Most significantly, they eliminated a points system that allowed you to get basically cash back on your orders that could be used against future purchases, stopped allowing returns, and started an online shop. During covid having an online retail presence seems obvious. However what has happened is that things that get donated that have obvious vintage or brand value go onto the online shop and not the physical retail location, and they go for ebay/market rates, not the usual ones. This is perhaps also an obvious thing to do if your goal is to make money for the charity behind the shop, but means that now all the best, cleanest, highest quality goods that are donated are inaccessible to the poor people who actually are most of the shop customers. And since I get emails weekly from the online shop I do see some of the stuff that goes through there and it definitely isn't making it into the bricks and mortar shop, so where is it going? No, I don't really actually trust this particular charity or the people who work in it that much. I have sent my feedback and concerns to the shop multiple times, via both email and feedback surveys, and never gotten a reply or acknowledgement of the issues of gentrifying the shop, so I have to imagine they don't really care. As much as I complain, it is still one of the very few places in this city that you can buy cheap decent quality clothing. Value Village sometimes charges more for the used version of an item than it would cost new and usually everything there is in bad shape. The vintage shops in Kensington were charging upwards of $28 for a raggedy t-shirt of no particularly notable brand/design. And my local charity shop charges $3-5. And it is still possible to find some stuff in decent shape and from medium-quality brands there. But, for example, a Roots hoodie that I bought there for about $15 that was almost brand new and probably retailed $150 never will make it onto the shelf there now. But I've gotten a ton of wear out of that hoodie, it's very warm, and I bought it because I needed a warm hoodie, not because I wanted something trendy to wear a few times and then get put away and never look at again. When people donate their stuff to a charity, do they care more about poor people getting access to that stuff, or do they care about the charity making as much money as possible off of that stuff? Is the point of the charity shop to clothe poor people at an accessible price point, or just to make money? Do poor people even deserve access to nice second hand things? Do not even get me started on people to go to charity shops like mine and buy up stuff to re-sell. Or spend thirty minutes in the changing rooms trying stuff on and showing off outfits and taking photos and chatting and then ultimately buying one or two things while a lengthy line waits to try things on. Part of the problem is just being in such a large city. That means there's a large market for fashionable vintage and retro stuff. When I was visiting my family recently I walked around the small city and went into multiple vintage/art/second hand stores there. The prices weren't nearly as bad and there were a few places selling things for second hand that were absolute steals. Manga for $9 instead of $15, books for $5 instead of $20, boxes and boxes of magazines and comics that, if they were here, would already have been picked through to death by collectors. I only regret not buying more and spending more time there. Retro video gaming has already become a hobby for rich people and collectors. I looked at a copy of SMT Devil Survivor Overclocked going for $120 yesterday. But I can go without a video game. I do still need to wear clothes. And seeing decent quality second hand clothing become a luxury commodity is infuriating. ⇄ Reply: mastodon+email ＄ Tip: ko-fi+liberapay Vintage vs Second Hand was last edited: 17 hours, 8 minutes ago