plus size clothes DON’T sit at the thrift store forever. general size clothes do. our donated clothes last maybe a few weeks tops at a thrift store because there’s a larger demand for them than supply, that’s why the sections are so damn small despite the average us woman being a size 14, because they’re picked over constantly by people who need clothes. i was not expecting to do this but i’m gonna go into deep detail so you understand why exactly this is fucked up.
poor people are more likely to be plus size because of lack of access to healthy food, which is the target demographic of a damn thrift store in the first place. thrift shopping is trendy now, which is fine, except when you buy clothes for projects like this that are in high demand but low supply: maternity clothes, plus size clothes, pajamas, etc. if you need clothing, buy it. but you can make any of these projects from clothes without poaching from low supply areas and taking comical pictures that mock fat bodies.
now here’s why there’s a ridiculously low supply of plus size clothes: fat people don’t have as many places to buy clothes and all of them have poor selection so we don’t buy a lot of them to begin with. the shopping pattern of a plus size person is very different from that of a straight size person as well. i know this from working in plus size retail. overwhelmingly, we shop when we desperately need clothes. and i mean desperately like hole the size of a basketball in the thigh of your jeans desperately. wearing a bra from 1998 desperately. work blazer held together with scotch tape and safety pins desperately. we can’t donate our clothes because we wear them until the point where we physically cannot anymore.
we also don’t cycle through trends as much as smaller sizes because a) shopping is a huge ordeal for a plus size person and b) our clothes cost WAY MORE so we can’t afford to wear an article of clothing once and then give it to goodwill. then on top of that none of the places that give you money for clothes EVER want your fatass clothes. skinny people can pop over to any secondhand clothing store that pays for donations and get some of that investment back. we can’t do that EVEN THOUGH our clothes cost way more than straight sizes. oh, and we get paid less than thinner women btw :) that’s always great.
so if we can’t regain any of our investment, we’re just gonna put up with clothes we don’t like until we can’t wear them anymore or we give them away in the case of weight loss (when ur fat you know a lot of other fatties, and if ur a queer/trans fatty someone is always having a clothing swap you can give to).
all of this adds up to make it so that thrift stores are in low supply of plus size clothes that more and more people need because us fatties? if we don’t look good we don’t get jobs. you cannot look even the slightest bit unkempt or you come off as lazy or bitchy, and if you have a family to support you can’t spend weeks looking for a job where they won’t judge your competence based upon whether your clothes are trendy or not. when you’re not plus size and you take away these clothes from needy women you are in small part enabling their suffering.
it shouldn’t be that way. women should have access to affordable, well fitting, professional clothing regardless of size. but that’s not the world we live in so you can’t just cover your ears and pretend that it is.
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