商务与英语阅读下2.ppt

;Chapter Twelve Abstracts from Articles on Consignment Auction 寄售与拍卖分析文摘;Step One;When Conscience and Closet Collide REVIEWING her wardrobe earlier this season, Elizabeth Marvin had a moment of reckoning. “How did this closet become so massively overstuffed?” she mused, disconcerted by the sight of so many Marni jackets, Chloé bags and Jimmy Choo shoes jostling for space on the racks. “From my green perspective, part of me feels guilty about being such a major consumer.” ;But Ms. Marvin, the New York sales director for the National Audubon Society and a self-described “major environmentalist,” felt neither so guilty nor so strapped that she planned to stop shopping cold turkey. “Instead of buying that Chloé jacket that I want right now,” she said, “I’m much happier purchasing something at a consignment store that is much less.”;In recent months, high-end designer resale shops have been the beneficiaries of a subtle shift in consumer thinking, as fashion lovers, even those who can afford to splurge, reassess their priorities. Unsettled by continuing recession fears and the soaring prices of designer clothes, and assailed by queasy consciences as well, many find these shops a way to update their wardrobes without seriously denting their bank accounts — or their sense of social propriety. ;“Everyone is feeling the pinch these days or knows people who are feeling the pinch,” said Linda Kenney Baden, a prominent lawyer in New York. “It’s good to buy a used car again, and it’s chic to buy used clothes.”;Shoppers like Mrs. Baden, some with formidable retail habits, are turning to consignment stores to offload designer clothing and accessories and to accumulate spare cash, as often as not plowing the profits back into the very same store. Cash-strapped bargain seekers and affluent trophy hunters alike are paring their closets, earning 40 to 50 percent of the resale shop’s asking price. Resale shoppers pay roughly a quarter to a third of the original market value of still-c