Selling the Poor : The Politics of Value Village
https://communityedition.ca/selling-...value-village/
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In the past two decades, second-hand clothing has — like many other cultural objects of the poor — become trendy, coveted and hip. There is now a bursting local market of vintage clothing shops, international online retailers and even commercial corporations like Urban Outfitters selling used and “revamped” items. While many second-hand stores often do contribute to charity, build community and decrease dependency on the global sweat-shop economy, when it comes to the massive retail corporation Value Village — where the reselling of donated used clothing is a corporate strategy marketed to poor people — it is critical to examine Value Village’s actual politics and their effects on low-income communities.
On the one hand, the search for cool second-hand goods has led to an increase of middle- and upper-class people shopping at Value Village. This expansion of its demographic has certainly normalized wearing second-hand clothes. This normalization has perhaps led to a decrease in the stigma that poor and working-class people may experience when their clothing is not visibly name brand, from the mall, high quality, or trendy. However, this has also led to the increasing prices of Value Village and other second-hand stores who are taking advantage of a developing market where second-hand clothes are a surplus commodity — objects that already exist, demand very little labour power to sell and maintain, and result in high profit levels for the original owners of the products, the owners and investors of Value Village.
This widening market is both responsible for and a result of a fetishization — a revaluing of an object for the purpose of consumption — of the clothing and style of poor and working-class people, particularly clothing racialized as belonging to a particular racial or ethnic group. The style of poor people is taken out of its context and sold as a commodity – appropriated – because it provides to consumers implied meanings that are both spatial (think rural or urban) and cultural (think dangerous or uneducated). One need only look at the lifestyle clothes of celebrities — and the way this is translated into mainstream, fast fashion — to see examples of poverty being fetishized.