VOA常速英语:寄售让旧衣焕发新生命

I feel like there’s a season in everyone’s life for consignment.
Yay, our first customers! Yay!
It’s the last hurrah for winter right now.All of the items that didn’t sell over the winter are now fair game.
They pay one registration fee price,no sales tax,
and are able to choose anything off the rack that they can fit on their bodies.
That’s called the all-you-can-wear-buffet.
New consigners come about for a number of reasons and it’s usually because of a change in their life.

either maybe their size changed and their clothes don’t fit anymore,
or they’ve had a change in their career or a lifestyle
and they need other kinds of clothes, and what they have they don’t need anymore.
So, it’s a good way to turn around that money into spare cash.
Here’s a coupon good for another thirty days.
Awesome, thank you.
It just means that you enter into an agreement to sell your things
and share the profit of what they sell for with the person who’s selling them.
We have a whole cross-section of America here.
All ethnicities, socio-economic status, genders, we have everyone.
Thank you so much.
You need some help in what to do?
We don’t want this stuff ending up in the landfill.
At some point there will be other uses for this fabric,
especially the nicer fabrics, the cotton’s, and the linens, and the silks,
which you don’t find as much in retail these days.
I think they will always have some value.
People these days don’t like to mend things.
They don’t like to sew buttons on.
So, they consign it because they don’t want to fix it,don’t have the time or don’t know how.
So every now and then,I take something home and sew a button on or stitch up a seam on my sewing machine.
And that’s all it takes to make it look nice as new.
OK, I got to go try these on.
When they no longer have a life here,is anyone going to find it useful?
I mean if nobody wants to buy it,is somebody gonna want to wear it?
We donate it to a lot of local clothing ministries,and hopefully they’re getting use out of those things.
From there, they get sold for pennies on the pound.
Where they go from there, I’m not sure.
It’s not working.
All set?
When we have beautiful fabrics,it’s hard for me to discard them.
I want to do something novel with them.
And I really see a need for local industry,for people to come together for a good cause,
and cut these fabrics into strips and weave them into something new.
If it can be created into something useful,people will buy it.
It’s something they need and with that money, you know,
you could fund a halfway house or something useful.
It’s community working together,
taking items that maybe have lost their purpose in life just like many drug addicts,
and having them recreated into something new.
It’s almost like breathing new life into something that needed some hope.