Things I learned from Reddit fashion

Summary

When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge. I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in the form of resellers who stalk Goodwill and remove everything priced below the pareto frontier to resell online, where you can’t try them on before buying. Goodwill has also gotten better about assessing their prices, and will no longer treat new cashmere and ratty fleece as the same category. But the market has only become efficient in the sense of removing easy bargains. It is still trivial to pay a lot of money for shitty clothes. So I turned to reddit and shoggoths, to learn about clothing quality and where the bargains are. This is what I learned. It’s from the POV of a woman buying sweaters and coats, but I expect a lot of the information to be generally applicable. General money saving tricks When shopping online, put an item in your cart, checkout enough to give them your email address, but don’t confirm the purchase. You will almost always get a reminder email with a discount. If this doesn’t work the shop is either very high end, or Amazon. It sometimes works with individual sellers on platforms like ebay and etsy. . You can use the wait as a cooling off period where you decide if you really want something. Most sales are fake. Real sales happen at the end of the season, when whatever you buy won’t be useful for another 9 months, if you have the misfortune to live somewhere with weather. Saving money through sales is like persistence hunting, which I find boring and stressful so I didn’t look into this much. But if you prefer it to thriting, I’m sure reddit will expl...