It’s a century, more or less, since the New Zealand Salvation Army began holding sales of second-hand clothes modelled on those it had been staging in Britain since the 1890s. The idea then was to offer the poor the chance to dress well and, in some cases, the dignity of labour, as they were trained to sort and sell discarded garments.
But it would, the term “opportunity shop” was coined by the philanthropist and former showgirl Lady Millie Tallis in 1925. Let the arguments rage over pavlova and the flat white, but “op shop” is emphatically an Australian invention.
