Small victories: Closing the clothing cycle

The ecofrugal life is not without its frustrations. One of them cropped up for me earlier this fall, when I discovered that my trusty lightweight coat — the one I've been wearing every spring and fall since 2009 — had developed a hole near the right shoulder too big for me to repair. (It was probably my purse strap rubbing on it for all those years that did the damage.)

Now, given that I bought this coat for a mere ten bucks at Goodwill and got roughly 25 seasons of use from it, you might say I have no real grounds for frustration here. But there was an additional wrinkle: after using the same coat for roughly ten years, I finally succeeded in finding a tailor to shorten the sleeves for me. This job cost me roughly $40, but it seemed justified given that the coat itself had cost so little to begin with and had served me so long already. I thought I'd probably be wearing it for another ten years at least, so it would be worth the expense to have it fit like it was made for me. And now, within a few years of making the investment, the coat had ceased to be presentable.

Adding to my frustration, I couldn't seem to find a decent replacement for it. True to my ecofrugal principles, I tried shopping secondhand first, but a search of two local thrift shops and several online ones turned up nothing suitable. I searched the sites of clothing retailers that got high marks from The Good Shopping Guide and Better World Shopper, but they either had no coats for sale or had none I liked as well as my old one. Some of them could have done an acceptable job, but they all would have cost me a minimum of $170, and my ecofrugal soul rebelled at paying that much for something that wasn't really what I wanted.

At the very same time I was having so much trouble finding a garment I actually needed, I was also having trouble getting rid of several that I didn't need. Some of these were in decent condition and could probably have been donated to the local thrift shop, but others were so old and worn they were fit only for textile recycling — something that we've discovered isn't that easy to do around here. There are a lot of places to drop off clothes in good condition for resale, but almost none that will take worn-out ones for repurposing.

With the help of the Helpsy website, I'd managed to locate a bona fide textile recycling bin within five miles of our house, but unfortunately it was in a direction we almost never go. We couldn't drop off our clothes there as part of our everyday errands; we'd have to make a special trip just for that purpose. So for a few months, these unwanted garments were just taking up space in a bag on my bedroom floor, and it wasn't until today that we finally got around to dropping them off. 

It was at this point that my frugal fashion luck started to change. Because, as it happened, the route to the textile bin took us right past the Goodwill store in East Brunswick — the very one where I'd bought my fall coat all those years ago. I'd mostly given up on going to this store, since its organizational scheme is such a mess that it's incredibly frustrating trying to find anything that fits. But since we were driving right by it, I figured it would be silly not to at least stop in and have a look.

The store was as disorganized as ever — so much that I nearly walked out empty-handed because I couldn't find the rack with the winter coats on it. But at last I located it and quickly started trying on coats right there in the aisle, not bothering to take them to the dressing room. And, amazingly, the third one I tried seemed pretty close to a perfect fit. The sleeves were a bit too long, but that was a flaw I could easily fix by just rolling them up. The price tag: $20, more than I'd paid for the old one (even accounting for inflation), but considerably less than any of the new ones I'd been considering.

So, after an unpromising start, this trip turned out to be the kind of ecofrugal victory that makes all the little frustrations seem worth it. In just one trip, I managed both to unload a bunch of garments I didn't want and acquire one I truly needed. My new-to-me coat is just as good as my old one, it cost less than one-eighth the price of a new one, and since it's secondhand, its green credentials are impeccable. And my old, unwanted clothes will now go on to new lives of their own. Perhaps some of them (the ones in good condition) will end up on thrift store shelves where they'll be just as great a source of frugal delight to some future buyer as this coat is to me. It's the ciiiiiiiiircle of clothes!