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Living on a Dime – Part II

Well…that was an eye-opening shopping trip.

First we took the kids to Salvation Army. The outside of the store was nondescript and unimpressive. I mean, if you could pick the absolute worst part of town to put a store – where the streets are littered and dirty, and apartment buildings are dank and low-class, this place would be it.

When we walked in the door, it wasn’t a whole lot better. The two clerks behind the counter looked like characters out of some kind of episode of happy days – where everyone wore 1970’s clothes. The Fonz wasn’t around though…

Overall it was a large store, they even had a whole section for household items and furniture.

But, wow…we started sifting through the racks and racks of clothes, and to my surprise we started finding some unbelievable gems. One of the workers told us that it just so happened that on the day we walked in, they had just received a large shipment of clothing from some warehouse – so they were looking to clear out as many existing clothes on the racks as possible. So for the week they were having a $5 per bag deal. These weren’t tiny little paper bags either. They handed us these extra large plastic bags with hard plastic handles.We went up and down the children’s isles, and to our surprise we found five pairs of pants, six shirts – and every single one of them looked brand new! Two pairs of pants still had the new tags attached! These were $20 pants – now stuffed into our $5 bag full of clothes. We’d probably end up paying less than 50 cents for it.

After going through the children’s clothes, we had so much room left in the bag that Cindy and I started to look at clothes for ourselves. I found an entire rack of jeans that looked brand new.

I found two pairs of jeans that looked completely unworn and were exactly my size.

By the time Cindy was finished, she’d found an additional two shirts that fit her perfect, one of which had the new tags still attached.

Needless to say, we were quite pleased walking out of Salvation Army with our $5 bag loaded with enough clothes that would have cost about $400 brand new.

Then, already more than happy, we went over to Goodwill. This store was a little nicer, in a decent neighborhood too. We walked in and noticed the store appeared a little cleaner and more organized.

We went straight for the children’s clothes. Overall we noticed that the quality of more of the clothes were nicer. We didn’t have to sift through volumes of very old and worn clothing to find those few gems. However, the prices were obviously slightly higher.

We still did very, very well. By the time we were finished, we had purchased 2 more pairs of pants, with original brand-new tags, for Holly at $4.99 each. We bought 3 more shirts for Samantha at $3.99 each.

On our drive home, we realized we’d bought all of the pants Holly would need, and all of the shirts Samantha would need, plus some clothes for ourselves, and we had stayed below our $35 limit.

I thought it was completely impossible…but after this shopping trip, I’m a believer. We may never go back to buying clothes for retail prices ever again.

The saga of  Jack’s family ( to be continued)