Consignment stores sell and purchase used clothing from their own customers. Sellers usually get a small amount of money or store credit back.

Thrift stores only sell community donations for a fraction of a new item's price. And while they do divert textile waste from the landfill, the DeCal would also like to bring awareness to the concealed practice of sending unprofitable goods to the landfill or across seas to developing nations, where they are often disposed of in open dumps. For this reason, we would like to emphasize a circularity of textiles & other goods through buying secondhand and avoiding cheap production in order to fully utilize existing resources, rather than creating demand for new ones.