Explores what happens when the often contradictory motivations behind style and survival strategies are brought together. Following the life stories of goods as they travel into and through second-hand sites, this book looks at the work of traders, as well as consumers' investments in second-hand merchandise. This is an important book. Using alternative economic spaces as a lens to re-examine the ways in which we think about such issues as the meaning of exchange, value and consumption, this volume provides a major challenge to the dominant conventional readings of these phenomena.