It's funny how Americans react to second hand clothes. It's absolutely normal in Europe, I'd rather spend a whole day shopping in vintage stores and get some rare and almost new designer clothes or really good and cheap high quality stuff
It's funny how first-worlder's are all ga-ga about 'designer clothes'. Where I'm at, people need something to wear and paying $2.00 is a lot and translates to a noticeable decline in the amount of food a family can consume.
In the day you take browsing the vintage clothes shops, a small team of people can pump out 500 articles of clothing that people need and can afford. Said people would otherwise be sitting on their asses because the people who made your original 'designer clothes' used their money to implement a 'new normal' by collapsing the economy.
On top of that the clothes are 'latest fashion' and actually look pretty nice. It's possible to take cuts of fabric which make the articles of clothing look nice and try different things. It's easy to make different 'runs' of different things that people actually need. It's also easy to choose low-quality cloth which people can afford, or higher quality (if one has the stock on-hand to do so.) It's also kind of fun to try to design things so they are durable but also practical to sew on old foot-powered sewing machines so that much of the work can be done in rural areas.
The main reason that it is impractical to do such a thing in the U.S. and Europe is because the governments provide welfare checks. And enforcement personnel run around fucking with people who might try to engage in cottage industry. I doubt that such a dynamic is lost on the social engineers.
