Why is the title “weirdly detailed”? Apparel, especially women’s apparel, is a massive market segment. Even if they’re only talking about thrift stores it’s an important economic subject.
> Hopefully, though, they'll see this content as it's intended to be seen: As a very weird love letter to thrifting from a very weird person.
So, the author is admitting they are weird for doing such an unsolicited analysis. But weird in a good way.
Women’s apparel is a 600B industry. It is highly segmented, and literal armies of people analyze category and product performance across millions of skus. So spending a lot of time on something like this is definitely not unusual.
I had some first and second-hand knowledge around pricing household appliances. There's a common assumption that "the manufacturer says 'charge X'", the retailer charges X+Y% and you all go home happy. And you could not be further from the truth if you tried: pricing is an insanely complicated process with negotiation from both sides and monitored by an army of secret shoppers to keep both sides honest.
This is describing what I imagine a few savvy bargain hunters know from experience and interest in the market. Being able to see massively undervalued items that don't fit in the catalogue, kind of like being able to pick horses at the races.
We took Show HN out too, because while this looks like an excellent submission, it's not a product or project that people can try out - see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.